NOTES on THE LIFE DIVINE
NOTES TO MYSELF after reading a few passages of Sri Aurobindo’s intense and intelligent book, The Life Divine.
SA: The human cannot remain always on the lowest rung. (Continue Reading)
INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL J. TUCKER, AUTHOR OF AQUARIUS FALLING AND CAPRICORN’S COLLAPSE
9/20/14 INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL J. TUKCER, AUTHOR OF AQUARIUS FALLING AND CAPRICORN’S COLLAPSE.
On August 20, I reviewed Aquarius Falling on Late Last Night Books, and on October 13 Mike will join us here as a monthly columnist..
Q: Most of us have many all-time favorite books. What are a few of yours and why are they among your favorites?
A: It starts with The Talented Mr. Ripley and includes the entire Ripley series by Patricia Highsmith. Her main character, Tom Ripley, is a psychopath, but Ms. Highsmith tells her stories in such a way that you are cheering him on, you want to see him survive and avoid capture. She was an amazingly talented author. (Continue Reading)
Writers and the Doctor Who Kills
9/17/2014 – Writers and the Doctor Who Kills
Psycho kept me out of the shower, and Jaws kept me out of the water. The Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime, an association of mystery writers and fans, just presented a talk by forensic psychiatrist Dr. Eindra Khin Khin on serial murderers in the health care professions. Now I want to keep away from doctors, nurses, and hospitals.
One chilling bit of data is that serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed 17, and Ted Bundy, who killed 30, just can’t reach the numbers that doctors can because doctors can evade detection and punishment so much longer. Convicted serial killer Dr. Harold Shipman of Great Britain killed an estimated 270 people but was convicted of killing 218. (Continue Reading)
SO LONG, FAREWELL … SORT OF
9/13/14 – SO LONG, FAREWELL … SORT OF
This is my last post as a regular contributor to Late Last Night Books. The writing has been fun, but my favorite part of the experience has been reader feedback. Whether you left your comment on the LLNB site, one of my Facebook pages, or delivered it up close and personal, I enjoyed the conversation. This last post is a roundup of some of the thoughts you shared, along with a fervent hope that our paths will cross again soon! (Continue Reading)
LEE SMITH—DISTINCTIVE VOICE OF SOUTHERN DIGNITY
9/10/2014 LEE SMITH—DISTINCTIVE VOICE OF SOUTHERN DIGNITY
Last month, in my review of Lee Smith’s novel Guests on Earth, I talked about the 
dignity and respect that Smith gives to her characters, not just in her latest novel, but in all her novels. This month I want to tell you more about that particular writing skill and about another of Smith’s strengths, a detailed attention to setting. I also promised to tell you about Smith’s personal connection to Guests on Earth, which is tied to her deep sense of place.
Over the years, Smith has published 13 novels and four collections of short stories. She’s won numerous writing awards, including the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and a Southern Book Critics Circle Award. (Continue Reading)
Hawke’s Point; No, You Can’t Have Her Number
9/7/14 — EVERYONE WANTS TO MEET MARY LOUISE
I should have seen it coming. There were hints, but I made light of them, and took just a few tentative steps to deflect them. It wasn’t enough, and my problem persists: Readers of my just-published novel want to know a lot more about Mary Louise. Or more specifically, they want to know how I know so much about Mary Louise. The men even want her phone number, as though I have it on speed dial.
Mary Louise is a part-time, high-priced call girl who plays a key role in my novel, Hawke’s Point. In the first draft she was a minor character, with just a meant-to-be-funny cameo appearance early in the book. (Continue Reading)
A BREAK FROM NOVEL READING
9/4/14 – A BREAK FROM READING NOVELS – BAD MISTAKE!
I have to take long breaks between writing novels. This summer, though, I went a month without reading one. Don’t let me do that again. (Continue Reading)
Late Last Night Books’ guest bloggers round-up
9/1/14 A ROUND-UP OF OUR FIRST YEAR’S 1ST-OF-THE-MONTH GUEST BLOGGERS
To read their full posts, click on “guest bloggers,” above. A biographical sketch appears at the bottom of each blogger’s full post.
Carolyn Sienkiewicz, October 1, “I have a particular attraction to mysteries translated from another language. When I see an author’s name that is clearly not English in origin, I’m inevitably enticed to pick up the book. The draw for me is that I know that there, between those inviting covers, will be a story that comes from another culture.”
Ron Cooper, November 1, “If you prefer stories about laid-off sheet metal workers driven to sell weed to pay rent on their roach-infested shotgun shacks, bankrupt farmers trying to figure out how to commit suicide yet have their families still collect double indemnity life insurance, and out-of-work grocery store clerks living out of their cars and who convince themselves they’re really not whores as they blow another stranger for the price of a shot of cheap liquor, rather than another NYT best seller about Hartford suburbanites swapping neuroses, you now have choices.”
J
ohn Beckman, December 1, “This text reaches out, in this shady knoll, and lays a friendly hand on your leg, several inches above the knee. (Continue Reading)
LATE LAST NIGHT BOOKS HAS A NEW LOOK
8/29/14 — IN ANTICIPATION OF ITS SECOND YEAR, AND IN ANTICIPATION OF ITS FIRST TRIP TO THE BALTIMORE BOOK FESTIVAL, SEPTEMBER 26-28, LATE LAST NIGHT BOOKS HAS A NEW LOOK AND WELCOMES NOVELISTS GARY CRAIG POWELL AND MICHAEL J. TUCKER AS NEW MONTHLY COLUMNISTS. (Continue Reading)
EXCESSIVE. VIOLENT. TENDER.
8/23/14 EXCESSIVE. VIOLENT. TENDER. by Sonia Linebaugh
“It is all excessive, violent, and at the same time full of tenderness.” These words are used by Lizelle Reymond to describe a landscape in Bengal, India, in To Live Within. Excessive. Violent. Tenderness. Individually and as a powerful chord the words express not only the land, but the essence of being alive in the 1969 memoir.
In a book published last month, Robin Black uses the word power itself. “I always wanted to be powerful. In this decade, finally, I look powerful. I feel powerful. And I feel alone.” The repetition of the word establishes strength before the counter melody intrudes in Life Drawing: A Novel. (Continue Reading)
Book Review: Aquarius Falling by Michael Tucker, reviewed by Gary Garth McCann
8/20/14 REVIEW OF THE NOVEL AQUARIUS FALLING BY MICHAEL TUCKER
“It’s easy to see how to do away with what we call crime…It can be done by giving the people a chance to live, by destroying special privileges…Nobody would steal if he could get something of his own some easier way…Jail is an evidence of the lack of charity of the people on the outside who make the jails and fill them with the victims of their greed.” The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow, Larson and Marshall, Eds., Modern Library, 2007.
The transition from childhood to adulthood is difficult. (Continue Reading)
On Interpretation
On Interpretation
8/17/2014 – American essayist Susan Sontag once wrote that, “The urge to interpret is the compliment mediocrity pays to genius.” Are these are fighting words?
She adds that, “We approach works of art in order to interpret them. Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world-in order to set up a shadow world of meanings….Interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone.”
Of course, this falls in the face of all the analysis of subtexts and symbols I struggled through as an English major. Should we simply experience a work of art or literature as it is? Does interpretation result in distancing oneself from the work itself, as if the work had been disinfected and sliced and now lay dead on a slide under the microscope? (Continue Reading)
BOOK REVIEW: GUESTS ON EARTH BY LEE SMITH
8/10/2014 BOOK REVIEW: GUESTS ON EARTH BY LEE SMITH
Sanity and insanity are more closely linked than most people realize, particularly in the lives of artists. Why is creativity often accompanied by some degree of madness? And why are women, particularly in the past two centuries, more likely to be judged insane than men? With a captivating mixture of fictional characters and people who actually lived, Lee Smith explores these questions and others in her latest novel, Guests on Earth. (Continue Reading)
8/7/14 — Louise Penny and the Inspector Gamache Series
8/7/14 — LOUISE PENNY AND THE INSPECTOR GAMACHE SERIES
When I told my wife and some friends that I was finally going to take their advice and read one of Louise Penny’s Inspector Armand Gamache novels, they all told me the same thing: You must read them in order! So of course I started with No 2, A Fatal Grace, and then turned to The Beautiful Mystery, which is No. 8. Well, I’m here to tell you that despite what everyone tells you, you can read Penny’s novels out of order and still live to sing their praises.
But unless you’re also the ornery type like me, why would you? You’ll be doing yourself a favor to follow directions and start at the beginning with Still Life. (Continue Reading)
The Jane Austen Persuasion
8/4/14 – THE JANE AUSTEN PERSUASION
When I told my adult daughters and son-in-law I’d be reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion for book club, all three pulled disgust faces. “Why?” groaned my older daughter, a Harvard graduate. “I couldn’t even finish Pride and Prejudice,” said my son-in-law, who had reveled in Plato and Cervantes and the rest of St. John’s Great Books curriculum. My younger daughter, another product of a Great Books curriculum, recalled that Harold Bloom had a reputation for droning on about Persuasion for reasons she was unable to fathom. (Continue Reading)
Out of the Woods, a review
7/23/14 Out of the Woods, reviewed by Sonia Linebaugh
Lynn Darling spent her life losing her way. She used to love the adventure, but by the time she’s into her fifties, a widow of ten years with her daughter off to college, getting lost has lost its allure. In order to find her way, both practically and metaphorically, Darling runs away to the Vermont woods only to find more ways to be lost.
The Subjectivity of Reading: How Do Your Favorite Books Fare on Amazon?
THE SUBJECTIVITY OF READING: HOW DO YOUR FAVORITE BOOKS FARE ON AMAZON?
I noticed recently that one of my favorite books, Anita Brookner’s Booker Prize-winning Hotel Du Lac, averages only 3.7 stars with 82 Amazon reviewers. Not a terrible rating, but surprisingly low to me since I love the book. Amazon features this sentence, quoted from one of the reviews: “The main character was dull and not very likeable, but that may have been the point.” Amazon adds, “10 reviewers made similar comments.” (Continue Reading)
7/17/2014 – A Cafe of Ideas
7/17/2014 – A Cafe of Ideas
The Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, fourth century B.C., once carried a lamp around in daylight looking for an honest man. I am not a philosopher, but I’ve thought about carrying a lamp around like Diogenes looking not for an honest man but for a good conversation. So imagine my envy when I visited Les Deux Magots and Le Cafe de Flore, two cafes in the Rive Gauche section of Paris, which Rick Steves calls “the cafes of ideas.”
As Steves says in his guidebook to Paris, “From Oscar Wilde’s Aestheticism (1900) to Picasso’s Cubism (1910s) to Hemingway’s spare prose (‘20s) to Sartre’s Existentialism (with his girlfriend Simone de Beauvoir (Continue Reading)
Challenged
7/13/2014 – CHALLENGED
What do a children’s story involving a wild rumpus, a novel about the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s, and a teenager’s sarcastic narration of a few days in his life have in common? Not much on the surface. But Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak), The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck), and The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger) are members of a surprisingly large club: at one time or another, each of these literary works has been banned somewhere in the United States. (Continue Reading)
Review of This Bright River by Patrick Somerville
7/10/14—A REVIEW OF THIS BRIGHT RIVER BY PATRICK SOMERVILLE
Sometimes a novel is interesting because of its story. Sometimes because of its characters. And sometimes because of the author’s writing techniques. I started reading This Bright River by Patrick Somerville expecting to be enticed by the novel’s story. I had read Somerville’s previous novel, The Cradle, a few years ago and liked the story about expectant parents’ search for the mother’s childhood cradle, an effort that brings them much more than a cradle. From the beginning, however, This Bright River is different and much darker. (Continue Reading)