Julie's Journal : A New Author

2020 has been the year that keeps on giving, hasn't it?  I have struggled to keep a positive outlook as the year has progressed.  One symptom of the year is that I have struggled to focus on books, particularly new-to-me books.  I have spent a lot of my reading time this year re-reading old favorites, rather than jumping into new books.  I probably haven't been as good at recommending books for patrons this year because of that.

However, I have discovered a new author I am enjoying.  Beth O'Leary is a young British writer.  On her website she says, "I write uplifting love stories - the sorts of books you reach for when you need a hug."  That has certainly been the type of book I have wanted this year.

Her debut novel was The Flatshare.  Tiffy is in need of a place to stay, and fast.  Leon needs a roommate.  They agree to an arrangement where Tiffy occupies the apartment at night, and Leon, who works nights, has possession during the day.  They will not ever actually meet.  The arrangement works out better than either could have expected and they begin to get to know each other through the notes they leave for one another.  I usually like a book written in dual POV (points-of-view) and this was no exception.  Although this is a light read, with a predictable happy ending, it does deal with some darker subjects - emotional abuse, stalking, wrongful imprisonment.

O'Leary's second book is The Switch.  Again written with a dual POV, the main characters this time are 29 year old Leena Cotton and her 79 year old grandmother, Eileen.  The book begins about a year after Leena's sister dies of cancer.  Leena is being required to take a sabbatical from her high-pressure job in London.  Eileen is looking for love after her husband left her, but she's finding pickings to be very slim in her small village.  They decide to switch lives - Leena will take on all her grandmother's projects in the village, and Eileen will move into Leena's London apartment and try to find love.  Both women are at first very lost in the others' world, but soon settle into their new lives.  Again, although the story is a light, happy read, it does deal with heavier topics; in particular The Switch deals with grief and moving forward after a death.

A word of caution - I have found that British authors seem to be much more liberal in their use of bad language than we might be used to, so don't be surprised to find profanity sprinkled throughout both books.

The Switch is available now on Overdrive/Libby and both hardback books should be coming soon to FCL.

Tom's Two Cents : A Larry McMurtry 'Quintet'

In literature there is a trilogy (three books in sequence) and a tetralogy (four books in sequence), but seldom, if ever, a “quintology,” which apparently is not even a word, so Larry McMurtry resorts to calling his five books in sequence by a musical term, “quintet,” which it is definitely not! The books in question, and in successive order, are: “The Last Picture Show,” “Texasville,” “Duane’s Depressed,” “When the Light Goes” and “Rhino Ranch,” the last novel McMurtry has written, published in 2015.

The whole business of whether or not this is a “quintet” can be settled most easily by simply re-classifying “Texasville” as a film script rather than a novel. Indeed, it follows the modern tendency of many novels today to read like filmscripts, with heavy emphasis on dialogue and not much else. By his own admission, McMurtry has written at least sixty filmscripts, so it is easy enough to see why he lapsed into that writing mode after completing his magnum opus, “Lonesome Dove”, in 1985. By the time he wrote “Duane’s Depressed,” in 1999, McMurtry was back into a true novelistic mode, focusing throughout on the character of Duane Moore, Thalia’s football captain in a very early novel that proved to be a great film success—“The Last Picture Show.”

I’ve just re-read the first three cited above and only recently finished the fourth, “When the Light Goes.” Maybe I’ll read the last, “Rhino Ranch,” later, but right at the moment I’m “McMurtried Out.” (This marathon all started several weeks ago with McMurtry’s Memoirs. Lest it be thought that I’ve read tons of pages, let me quickly stress that the sum of all these eight books has been less than the sum of one Russian novel, that being “War and Peace”!) The best of these five is certainly the middle one, “Duane’s Depressed,” going as it does into a considerable depth of its male protagonist, Duane Moore, who does not emerge until “Texasville” as a personality in his own right.

The next-to-last novel is not a worthy sequel, and I’m guessing that the sequel to the sequel isn’t, either. Again, as in many of his books, McMurtry’s female characters are generally more interesting than his male ones, Gus MacRae and Woodrow Call excepted. Duane is interesting somewhat, but he is mostly a very passive character, dominated by strong women. And this so-called “quintet” begins to lose steam after “DD” very quickly, degenerating, in my opinion, into what, from a less prestigious author than McMurtry, I would call “cheap trash.” Be thus forewarned!

Tom's Two Cents : A Larry McMurtry Binge

 

Some sage once said that desperate times call for desperate measures. It doesn’t really matter at the moment who said it, but right now it’s certainly true.

I am in the middle of what I can only call a Larry McMurtry Binge. Is it better than a nightly binge out? I wouldn’t know because in Mt. Vernon, at least, where I am pleasantly stuck, I wouldn’t be having a binge out, even if it were possible. (The closest I have come to a binge here lately was a few weeks or so back, when I had a couple of rum and cokes at lunch at Stevo’s and had to be driven home by my heroic EJK, where I got out of his truck and promptly sat down in the middle of my own flower bed.) Anyway, a McMurtry binge is much safer, and, at my age, surely less embarrassing!

It all started with a re-reading of “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen” (1999), a substantive book about McMurtry’s family as much, or more, than the German philosopher of the title. There followed, in 2008, 2009, and 2010, three short volumes of a “memoir,” respectively entitled “Books,” “Literary Life,” and “Hollywood,” each devoted to separate phases of McMurtry’s career: book collecting and selling, book writing, and film-script writing.

Surprisingly, McMurtry says that collecting, not writing, is his real passion, and that script-writing (some seventy in all) rather than fiction writing has been his “bread and butter” over the years. He further contributes his fame as a writer to the success of the mini-series of “Lonesome Dove” (adapted by Bill Witliffe) rather than to the book itself, despite its winning him a Pulitzer Prize. Surprisingly as well, he does not name “Lonesome Dove” as one of his own favorites among his books. Well, all I can say to that is, writers are seldom the best judges of their own work. “Lonesome Dove,” remains, in my opinion, his crowning achievement, and was so recognized by the Pulitzer Committee.

The eldest son of the youngest of nine sons of a pioneering West Texas family, McMurtry didn’t live the Cowboy Dream, but he was surely in a unique position to write about it. It being that unique period in Western U.S. History before the advent of the railroads and barbed wire changed the Cattle Trail Drives forever. If you are at all interested in McMurtry and stories of the old West, try “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,” which might lead you to explore one or more of the other memoirs.

McMurtry, now 84, divides his time between Tucson, Arizona, and Archer City, where his book store “Booked Up” still operates.