"Everything Happens As It Does" by Albena Stambolova *****

• Open Letter Series
• Bulgarian author
• Originally published in 2013
• p.11...."Movement and silence hand in hand.,  Intimations of other silences, of other movements, of someone walking next to someone, hovered around them.,  Each bend in the path made him anticipate the next.  It was anticipation too brief to invite fear, under the dome of the indefinite woods, dimensionless like a house never visited." ...I have felt this but could never articulate it!
• p.17..."Between the act of pressing the washing machine button and the mood of the person pressing it there was an entire universe of folly that people called their lives."...incredibly poignant!
• p.30...He disappeared from their life together, from the life of his baby, and from his own life, which had only just begun to acquire a life-like shape.  Or to be more precise, he tried to disappear, going back to the house he had always inhabited--the house of his mother."  crawling back to the womb
• p.42...."Until then she had only felt herself from within, she had learned a thing or two, but somehow one-sidedly, as if under an umbrella hiding half the world from sight,.".......lovely
• p.50..."There was no contact between her and the overall system that made the cafe function, as if they were meeting on a cloud, beyond time and space."
• p.55..."My bed is my ship, she often said to herself, my territory , my planet.  The planet of the Little Prince.  With his sheep."...interesting reference
• p.81...."Philip turned these questions over and over in his mind like coffee beans in a grinder.  At first they would spill with a deafening sound, then they would patter around, lullingly, until ground to a fine powder that covered everything inside.  Then the machine would stop turning.  Until the next time."
• p.83..."She was sitting, pensively sipping her glass of champagne, knowing that this thing here, this evening, this night...was all well, the way it was.  There was no fear, there was no reason to be doing anything different from what was being done.  What exactly was being done, Margarita did not know, and she did not care to find out."
• p.88...."As a matter of principle Maria did not permit herself such thoughts.  No analyses of any kind.  A snapshot was sufficient for her.  Analysis made one weak.  It interfered with one's goals.  People who believed they achieved anything by analyzing the situation deluded themselves.  They never achieved what they wanted, instead achieving something else.".....fatalism...theme of the book
• p.91..."The world accepts you if you don't try to think about it."
• p.99..."There was no anxiety, no worry about anything; there was only this, her, where everything happened as it did.".....TITLE
• p.101..."He decided to place his trust in a part of himself that was not his head and that--unlike his head--had never betrayed him."...spirit, soul, instinct?
• Review:   Lovely, lovely writing.  This author is Bulgarian, and the novel was translated into English.  So I hope the Bulgarian is as beautiful as the translation!  I was engaged by the protagonist from the first page, and completely intrigued by his psyche and his way of moving through the world, along with all the other characters.  The theme of this novel is fatalism, trusting in something other than the analytical mind that everything will happen as it does.  Fabulous!

"The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel" by Magdalena Zyzak *****

• A LibraryThing Early Reviewer selection
• Polish author
• Scheduled for publication in 2014
• Setting:  Fictitious country, Scalvusia, in 1939 
• Vocabulary:
• borborygmus:  intestinal rumbling
• ensorcell:  to bewitch
• bescumber:  to discharge ordure or dung upon
• gnathic: of or pertaining to the jaw
• p.2..."...I expreienced a sadness not unlike when one remembers one once had a childhood."
• Barnabas...the "unwitting lynchpin" in the story
• p.120..."Men don't betray each other after they have searched bushes together.  It's a matter of honor."
• p.209..."His life had become romantic at last.  His imagination had collapsed onto his boredom like a one-ton unicorn onto a pygmy pig."
• Review:  This is an Eary Reviewer edition I got from LibraryThing.com. It is the author's debut novel and I am stunned that this is a first.  This satire/allegory/theater of the absurd story is reminiscent of "Waiting For Godot".  I laughed, chuckled and almost wept over the plight of this cast of characters and their slapstick absurdity.  At the same time, it is a tragic tale of ignorance and blind acceptance of fear based rhetoric.  The kind of twisted logic that cost six million people their lives during WWII and continues to cost lives in the present day around the world.  The readers can choose to appreciate this brilliant novel as a funny tale of fools, or can leave themselves vulnerable to a profound tale of the absudity and tragedy of the creatures we call humans!

"The Cuckoo's Calling" by Robert Galbraith/J.K. Rowling ***

• Audiobook
• English author
• Originally published in 2013
• Review:   I enjoyed this book.  I liked the two main characters and thought the plot was interesting.  The only problem was that, in my opinion, some of the sleuthing process dragged on.  Fortunately I was engaged enough to want to find out "whodunnit".

"The Thin Man" by Dashiell Hammett. **

• Audiobook
• US author
• Originally published in 1934
• Review:  So-so....liked the movie better!

"The Shadow of the Crescent Moon" by Fatima Bhutto. ****

• Audiobook
• Afghani author
• Originally published in 2013
• Review:  A moving story of life in Pakistan, and the toll endless conflict takes on families, friends, and lovers.  When will it end?

2014 Blog.......

http://my2014readingjournal.blogspot.com/

"The Wizard of Oz" by L. Frank Baum *****

• Audiobook, narrated by Anne Hathaway
• US author
• Originally published 1900
• Review:  Nothing new to report

"Child of God" by Cormac McCarthy *****

• Audiobook
• US author
• Originally published 1973
• Setting:  hills of East Tennessee 
• Character:  Lester Ballard......ignorant, impulsive, impoverished, isolated, and....innocent....primitive prdator.....child of god?
• Review:   Clearly one of the great writers of our generation!  Meet Lester Ballard of east Tennessee....ignorant, impulsive, impoverished, isolated, emotionally needy, and....innocent....primitive predator.....and child of god? I think Lester is McCarthy's everyman.  It is painful to follow his tracks in this story, primarily because he acts out all that is uncivilized, unsocialized, and dark about being human.  Not easy to read because Lester is not easy to love, yet I loved the character and the story. 

"Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish" by David Rakoff. **

• Audiobook
• US author, from NPR's "This American Life"
• Originally published in 2013
• Review:  not my cup of tea

"The Cricket on The Hearth", by Charles Dickens. ****

• Audiobook
• English author
• Originally published in 1845
• Review:  A sweet tale with the ubiquitous wonderful characters for which we love Dickens!

"A Christmas Carol", by Charles Dickens (Narrated by Tim Curry). *****

• Audiobook, narrated by Tim Curry
• English author
• Originally published 1843
• Review:  Is it any surprise that listening to Tim Curry read this incredible story aloud was a memorable treat?  I had never read the story before and thoroughly appreciated it to a much greater degree than any film or stage version.  Dickens is unsurpassed in his use of language, his memorable characters, and great storytelling!

"How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" by Mohsin Hamid. *****

• Audiobook
• Pakistani author
• Originally published in 2013
• Review:  Hamid's writing is brilliant!  The unique approach of a novel constructed as a self-help book is really clever without feeling at all gimmicky.  The dark humor is delivered perfectly in this audio edition of the book, read to us by the author.  Hamid's use of language is nothing short of masterful!  This novel mocks the dream of wealth and the path one might be forced to travel in order to achieve it.  The overall effect is a smart, tongue-in-cheek denouncement of a life spent seeking riches, a somewhat frightening perception of corporate dark machinations, and a resounding socio-political statement!

"Poems" by Lord Byron

• Poetry
• Audiobook
• Narrated by Tyrone Power
• Review:  lovely

"Black Water Rising" by Attica Locke ****

• Audiobook
• Debut
• Mystery/suspense
• US author
• Originally published 2009
• Review:   I was initially drawn to this novel as a debut suspense novel, yet it truly is so much more than that.  Set in the Texas bayou outside Houston, a fluke of circumstance leads to a tale of corruption, murder, attempted murder and all of the machinations one would expect.  However, this is also a well told story of a man on the verge of fatherhood who must find a way to resolve the crime, his past, and his future.  it is a tale of integrity...doing the right thing when no one is looking.  Well done!

"Sir Ralph Richardson Reads John Keats", by John Keats ****

Review:  Lovely audio edition, read by Sir Ralph Richardson.  Poetry is so much better when it is read aloud!!

"The Bones of Paris" by Laurie R. King ****

• Audiobook
• US author
• #2 in Harry Stuyvesant series
• Early Review edition from LibraryThing
• Originally to be published in 2014
• Review:  Any fan of Laurie R. King's will be happy to see her in top form with this novel, " The Bones of Paris".  Set during 1929 in Paris, the time of Hemingway, Picasso, and other artists' haunting the city of lights, this story is fast-paced, historically interesting, and sufficiently complex to keep the reader's attention.  I would have to say that the only flaw was that in my opinion the start was slow. It wasn't until about page 100 that everything clicked into place, and from then on I was hooked.  Excellent!

"Andrew's Brain" by E.L. Doctorow *****

• Early Reviewer selection on LibraryThing
• US author
• Originally scheduled to be published in 2014
• Vocabulary:
• langur:long tailed monkeys
• breughel:  ?
• Reference to major transition occurring regarding mental illness and neurological research
• p.8..."Well, it's a short step from anthropomorphism to hearing voices."..........love it
• p.19...."My soul resides in a still, deep, beautiful, emotionless, calm cold pond of silence.".....sociopath?
• mountains giving a "sense of the nonhuman world we live in.......Americans like to catch rides in that world."
• p.29...."Where most people live, most of us, imagining it to be the real sunlit world when it is only a cave lkit by the flickering fires of illusion."...wow
• p.31...""If consciousness exists without the world, it is nothing, and if it needs the world to exist, it is still nothing."
• Concept of the brain coming to a decision seconds before the person is conscious of it.....implications?
• p.38..."It is what is left of the dead that is still them, that fragment of the voice that renders a moral nature though the rest of the person is gone."....like my late mother's voice
• p.45....."As evolved beings we have in our genes memories of the far past, of long-ago generations, memories of experiences not our own."............instinct?
• p.51...."To walk the fields is to feel yourself breasting the air, leaving behind you the sound of tinkling ice and a tubular indication of your form."...lovely
• p.104..."True happiness comes of not knowing you're happy, it's an animal serenity, something between contentment and joy, a steadiness of the belonged self in the world."...like this
• p.107..."Given the inspiration, anyone can step into an identity because the brain is deft, it can file itself away in an instant.  It may be stamped with selfhood, but let the neurons start firing and Bob's-your-uncle."....LOL
• Concept of the collective brain.....i.e.  people being in a park define the park, the "brain of an ant colony is the colony."
• p.140..."But it is dangerous to stare into yourself.  You pass through endless mirrors of self-estrangement.  This too is the brain's cunning, that you are not to know yourself." 
• p.186..."I thought how contention makes us human."...not sure I agree with this one
• Significant events:  death of child, death of wife, time at White house
• Review:  Brilliant!  Spend a few hours inside the mind/brain of cognitive neuroscientist?........multiple personalities?......inadvertent disaster catalyst?......Andrew!  Doctorow's use of language is masterful as he leads us on a quest for meaning, which after survival, is paramount to us humans.  Just read it!

"Billy Watson's Croker Sack" by Franklin Burroughs *****

• Book club selection, December 2013
• US author
• Essay/Short Stories
• Settings:  Move back and forth between author's hometown in Conway. South Carolina and his current home in Maine.
• Reference to Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River", a coming of age tale about fishing
• "Big Two-Hearted River" is a two-part short story written by American author Ernest Hemingway, published in the 1925 Boni & Liveright edition of In Our Time, the first American volume of Hemingway's short stories. It features a single protagonist, Hemingway's recurrent autobiographical character Nick Adams, whose speaking voice is heard just twice. The story explores the destructive qualities of war which is countered by the healing and regenerative powers of nature. When it was published, critics praised Hemingway's sparse writing style and it became an important work in his canon. (Wikipedia)

 

• "A Snapping Turtle in June":  daughter's turtle and memory of turtle from childhood
• "I tended to associate femininity with paved streets.......so that they would not get stuck in the rainy weather, or have their children tracking mud into the house or getting their feet full of ringworm."
• Upon smelling a turtle as an adult..."Instead, it brought back directly a sensation of alarm, confusion, and disorientation, in about the same way that the smell of anesthetic does not bring back the operating room so much as it brings back the vertiginous feeling of the self whirling away from the self."
• p. 18...first reference to a croker sack
• "New England seemed, as it often does, more perfect in the intensity of its seasonal moment, and in the whole seasonal cycle that can be felt within the moment, than any place has a right to be."
• "But what any child will think or remember is beyond anybody's knowing, including its own."............theme of entire collection, in my opinion

• "Of Moose and a Moose Hunter":  neighbor who is a remnant of the individualist in Maine
• "Sometimes you could follow one for half a mile like that, the moose never losing its capacity for undiluted primal horror and amazement each time the car came into sight."......like peek-a-boo at the right age with children
• "The moose would seem to come from some place altoghther different, and that place most resembled the elegiac world of the pastoral painting, an Arcadian dadream of man and nature harmoniously oblivious to the facts of man and nature."
• Vocabulary:
• "Arcadian":   rural, rustic, or pastoral, especially suggesting simple, innocent contentment
• agora:   a popular political assembly 

• Funny? scene when children dress up moose and put chair under its hanging carcass

• "In a Small Pond":big events in a small pond while fishing with his father

• "You must live in a hot, swampy, tidewater sort of a place to know the allure of mountains, to understand the psalmist:  'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my salvation.'"
• "The important thing was not to have a good time."...about learning fishing
• "But upon our entry into them, sanctuaries become microcosms.  We carry the excluded world in our memories and even in our daydreams, and it can suddenly surface in the form of a big mudfish or of the dark cedar swamp into which the Big Two-Hearted River disappears."........symbolic of one memory leading to another
• Big fish.....in a small pond...literal and figurative 

• "Dawn's Early Light":  Opening Day memories and WWII
• "I have an idea that many of the things we do may be like that--more important in their incidental details and accidental associations than at the center, and most important at the remotest boundaries , where your conscious, finite purpose draws its nourishment from unrealized or half-realized impulses and memories."
• "Once in Sunday school we were asked what we would have presented to the infant Jesus in the stable, if we had gone there.  The right answer turned out to be a pure heart, or something along those lines, but I knew inside myself that it would be a pair of wood duck, bright and friendly as the ones Audobon had painted."

•  "Postscript":
• "It pleases me how both the bird and the word have managed to outlast the circumstances that formed them.  We think of nature and history both as belonging to the opportunists, the ones who teach us how to adapt, evolve, seize the day, or fill the niche.  On the whole, we are right to think this way, but the world is also full of quirky and implausible survivors, things that still live, as neurotic people do, by a logic that eludes or defies us, because it is rooted somewhere out of sight."
• "I assumed that it was all common place, universal, and without distinction or interest of any sort.  Now, as I begin to write about it, I more and more conclude that what is undistinguished can nevertheless turn out to be genuinely and stubbornly distinctive." 

• Review:  Do you have places or events which you hold dear?  Which contributed to who you are right now?  Well, find a cozy corner and curl up with this marvelous collection of short story/essays for a few hours.  Franklin Burroughs will take you into his childhood and his adulthood, into South Carolina and Maine, hunting and fishing with men who shaped him and men whom he is impressed by.  Allow the author to beautifully remind you that we never know what lies beneath the surface of our psyche unless we allow it to unfold, just as we never know what we will find when we start to tell a story or to open up Billy Watson's croker sack.  Sometimes the power of a word or tale lies in the periphery of our souls......Mmmmmm.

"Tinkers" by Paul Harding ****

• Audiobook
• US author
• Originally published in 2009
• Review:  A fascinating fictional journey to death in the mind of a dying man.  The boundaries are fading between past and present, between the dying man and people from his past, and between life and death.  I enjoyed the author's use of language.  I found myself thinking that it wouldn't be a bad way to go.  Having spent time volunteering in a hospice, the connection between the utterances of a dying person and what may be occuring in their inner world seemed so plausible.  Very good book!

"The Shining" by Stephen King

• Audiobook
• US author
• Mystery/Suspense
• Originally published 1977
• Review:  It just does not make any difference!  Regardless of how many times i tell myself I will not get sucked into Stephen King's terror inducing storytelling......I always get sucked in.  He is consistently able to tap into the part of my psyche susceptible to sheer terror.  How does he do it?  The hedge animals were the creepiest part of this one!

"Waging Heavy Peace" by Neil Young. **

• Audiobook
• Autobiography
• Originally published. 2012
• Review:  A rambling journal entry whose focus didn't resonate with me at all.

"Her Royal Spyness" by Rhys Bowen. ***

• Audiobook
• #1in Royal Spyness series
• Originally published in 2007
• English author
• Review:  A light and entertaining murder mystery set amongst the impoverished British aristocracy.  Fun.