Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter

...but it wasn't a good living, it was begging with paint on its face...

What is it this young man reminds me of? A piece of music composed for one instrument and played on another.

Have you ever stared stark failure in the face, young man? The trick is, to outstare it.

Another brilliant effort from Angela Carter from 1984.  A plot summary hardly helps:  in 1899 or thereabouts, a young American journalist journeys to London to interview the extraordinary Fevvers, a woman of prodigious physicality who sports two huge wings coming out of her back.  She is the star of an international circus, and the two continue on to Russia for a cosmopolitan tour, and then into Siberia. If that sounds good, it's about 2% of the story.  The depth at which Carter constructs her character, her effortless sparkling prose, her odd theme of feminist empowerment, the sheer Dickensian storytelling-within-storytelling:  she's amazing.

Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks

Trouble with reading Charlotte Gray was that I expected it to be an extension of Birdsong, Faulk's exceptional First World War novel. It's not, clearly -- it's about the Second World War and there's almost no battlefield action (while large portions of Birdson are literally in the trenches).  It's about a love affair between a young Scottish woman and an RAF pilot who goes missing in France.  The young woman resolves to find him.  And it's hard to put down.  But didn't destroy me like Birdsong did.

Note to self:  what's a "sprung floor?" Faulks uses the phrase at least a half-dozen times. ANSWER: a floor with some shock absorption, used primarily for dance floors or sporting facilities.

Just looked up the 2001 movie which got mostly negative reviews:  they significantly changed the end of the book, which is annoying.

Victory by Joseph Conrad

The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence, with a vulgar, ferocious energy.

The young man learned to reflect, which is a destructive process, a reckoning of the cost. It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world.  Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog, which the pitiless cold blasts of the father's analysis had blown away from the son.

Here I am on a Shadow inhabited by Shades.

House of Names by Colm Toibin

In the Clytementra final chapter in House of Names, she is dead and can't remember any names but moves through the palace corridors looking for someone.  only at the end does she remember her son Orestes' name.  It's very beautifully put, her speechlessness, because we see her thinking and only at the end does she blurt something out.  Reminds me of my mother, whom I'm sure is having all kinds of revlations and conversations and memories in her head that she can no longer find the words for.

Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift

Trajectory: Stories, by Richard Russo

The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter

Rick Foucheux as King Lear at Avant Bard Theatre, Arlington VA

I am sure my love's more richer than my tongue.  Cordelia

Come not between the dragon and his wrath.  Lear

The bow is bent and drawn. Make from the shaft.  Lear

Kill thy physician, and thy fee bestow upon the foul disease.  Kent

The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography by Edmund Gordon

Terrific book. After WISE CHILDREN, her fantastic final novel, a deep plunge in the life and times of an extraordinary human being and writer.

Wise Children by Angela Carter

American War by Omar El Akkad

Set in the near post-apocalyptic future, America has divided due to climate change flooding and drought, bioterrorist plague, and civil war between south, north and west.  Interesting "racial" novel I think.  Heroine/protagonist/terrorist is black but only glancingly so. Novel is about political and class divisions, not race.

The North Water by Ian McGuire

A little bit Moby Dick Lite, a little Heart of Darkness.

Compulsively readable!

Rick's Bag of Tricks, a poem by Rick Cannon

Rick's Bag of Tricks

The days shuttle endlessly
undoing the neat weave
of your suit.  You hardly
notice, until one day
the cuff is gone and part
of the sleeve.  You laugh,
buy another.  The trick is
not to trust metaphor.

Of some people you say
"these are mine and these
own me."  Their several glows
seem warm jewels or sloops
to haul yourself up on.
One day you are bereft.  You
might laugh.  The trick is
not to trust friendship.

You shout "Metaphysics!"
Someone replies "Metabolism!"
Moving closer you say "That's
what I meant." The other
answers "Of course." You slow
down.  You move together.  It
is a dance.  The trick is
to trust nothing else.

Rick Cannon

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead

Nicotine by Nell Zink

Clever, odd, arresting and funny novel.  Lots of ideas.

"She was saying that Marxism isn't any better than capitalism, because they're both based on a world without friendship and love, where everything's for sale! A male world, basically. Money instead of nature.  Welcome to New York."

"Medicaid's an instrument of oppression. We'd have had a revolution a long time ago if the poor were dying in the streets like they're supposed to."

"That's something your dad used to say, about how it's the stories we tell ourselves that cause all the problems. If you look reality straight in the eye, you end up a lot less confused.  It's a matter of signal-to-noise ratio. Any story you tell has to be all signal. Any distraction is noise. Anything extraneous is noise. Now try to define extraneous. In life, nothing's extraneous. There's no noise. It's all signal. That's Freud. The early Freud."

"You're not too tired to go to work!"
"It's not like I'm a waitress, or operating a jackhammer or something. All I have to do is get to Manhattan and sit down."

Moonglow by Michael Chabon

Pretty good.  A little long-winded, but maybe that's because I went for the large-type edition, to avoid the long queue for the regular version.  He has an annoying last name, hard to remember how to pronounce.  Shay-bun.  The internet says that this has been verified by his publisher.  I guess Moonglow is a fictional memoir, or an autobiographical novel.  There was a time when I would have cared to find out.  Now, I'll just wait around until I hear it second-hand.

1984 by George Orwell

Longer, and more tedious, than I remember when I read it in high school.  The love affair is the most interesting writing -- and it's all being set-up for the (much shorter) interrogation/torture scene.

The Trespasser by Tana French

Lincoln at the Bardo by George Saunders

https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2017/02/08/grief-ghosts-and-america-lincoln-bardo/1VuOyXTYnREDjOh4clbhiN/story.html

almost too rich to quote:  I could cite the whole thing.  Stunning consisent beautfiul voice.

compare to Dante
compare the Spoon River
compare to our town

liminal sketching of Lincoln

three main narrators, Blevin and the Rev. and ??

the emotional climax at the end:  the black man's ghost enters Lincoln and decides to go with him, out of the cemetary and back to Wash DC, as Lincoln decide to pull for both black and white from then on.

Used loosely, the term "bardo" refers to the state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth. According to Tibetan tradition, after death and before one's next birth, when one's consciousness is not connected with a physical body, one experiences a variety of phenomena. These usually follow a particular sequence of degeneration from, just after death, the clearest experiences of reality of which one is spiritually capable, and then proceeding to terrifying hallucinations that arise from the impulses of one's previous unskillful actions. For the prepared and appropriately trained individuals the bardo offers a state of great opportunity for liberation, since transcendental insight may arise with the direct experience of reality, while for others it can become a place of danger as the karmically created hallucinations can impel one into a less than desirable rebirth.

Wise Children by Angela Carter

Her date of birth, like that of so many actresses, a moveable feast.