Week 19: One Amazing Thing and Mendoza in Hollywood

By -
One Amazing Thing, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Divakaruni is my favorite writer of contemporary fiction; I just love her books. (So thanks, Monica, for hooking me on her!) This new novel uses the old form that Boccaccio and Chaucer used of a gathering of different people, each of whom tells a story. Here, the characters are in San Francisco, applying for visas to India, when an earthquake hits and traps them in the basement visa office. In order to bear the difficulties of waiting for rescue, they tell personal stories that explain much of their lives and why they are where they are.

It's not a long book, but it's absorbing and well-written. I loved it.






Mendoza in Hollywood, by Kage Baker


The first Company novel, In the Garden of Iden, told the story of Mendoza, a Spanish girl rescued from the Inquisition's dungeons and sent on her first mission to Mary I's England. In this third installment of the series, Mendoza is again the narrator, now living in Los Angeles in 1862. Well, actually at a stagecoach stop in what will someday be Hollywood; one of the residents is a cinema fanatic who knows every inch of the future city, so there's plenty of film detail even though none of it exists yet.

As the books progress, the overarching plot starts to take shape and the Dr. Zeus Company starts to look more and more sinister. I'm really interested in how this series is going to develop.

Comments

  1. AmiraMay 8, 2010 at 10:23 PM

    I haven't read anything by Divakaruni and you've made me interested. Which book should I try first?

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanMay 8, 2010 at 10:47 PM

    Well, the short story collection "Arranged Marriage" was what hooked me 10 years ago. I also really like The Mistress of Spices and Sister of my Heart. The Palace of Illusions is more recent, and it's a retelling of some events in the Mahabharata from the POV of the Pandava brothers' wife Draupadi. I am embarrassed to admit that I didn't finish that one; I was just certain that something awful was going to happen and I didn't want to get there. I should try again, because it's a great book.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Robin MMay 18, 2010 at 10:24 AM

    You are reading the most amazing books and by authors I haven't heard of before. Enlightening. Will have to check them out on amazon.

    ReplyDelete
  4. JeanMay 18, 2010 at 10:59 AM

    Oh thanks!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more