Category Archives: reading

The Monday Book

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Jack’s Guest post – The Swan Thieves

Wendy and I listened to Elizabeth Kostova’s 17-disc novel as a recorded book to entertain us from Big Stone Gap all the way to western Wyoming and part of the way back. We like big books for big drives, and we cannot lie. Actually, I believe that the voices made a big difference and held our attention well.

As for the story – I thoroughly enjoyed it. The format is the tried and trusted multi-strings that begin as if they are completely unrelated, seem to develop without any obvious connection, and then finally resolve with all loose ends satisfactorily tied up.

The tale opens with a successful artist being arrested for attempting to damage a painting in a New York art gallery and continues through the voices of him, his ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, a 19th C. French artist and her uncle, and mainly the opening artist’s psychiatrist.

I’ve often found that this style of book loses me as I try to keep up with the different strands, but this time I had no problem and I felt gripped all the way to the end. The story is set mainly in New York, Maine, N. Carolina and Paris as well as 19th C. Normandy. Among other elements of enjoyment, the author really describes them well.

I suppose if I have any quibble at all it’s that the different threads of the story were rather abruptly brought together at the end, almost as if Kostova. got fed up and decided she’d had enough. I would have preferred a gentler landing perhaps. Then again, a book that entertains for 17 hours of driving is holding its own.

The Monday Book: OFF THE CHART by Molly O’Dell

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OdellWe pause from Jack and Wendy’s adventures in South Dakota/Wyoming to bring you this week’s The Monday Book.

Poetry isn’t really my thing but about twice a year we have a poet’s event in the bookstore. Last year we had Molly O’Dell as one of the poets, and I really enjoyed her work. Accessible, rhythmic, cadenced like local chat, nuanced and perceptive.

Molly sent me a copy of her recently published book of poems Off the Chart. I love pun titles; Molly is a doctor and director of a local health district, so many of her poems are about patient encounters, and her own experience with a mastectomy.

My favorite might be “Appalachian Pearl” and I’m reproducing the first half of it here so you can see how Molly combines the everyday to make things more than the sum of their parts. Punctuation indicates a new line, and where there wasn’t any I’ve used a slash, since WordPress is not conducive to lining out poetry:

I knew her grandmother, first woman down here to run an agency, and her mother, first to divorce. She carries their grit inside/behind her teeth, between the creases. She cuddles her child/like a bag of canning salt pulled off the shelf between vinegar and sugar.

I also loved “After he walks in to make an appointment,” about a guy with a bad rep she treats for a saw wound, after calling her grandmother to see if he’s safe. And the three or four poems about human dignity, often having to do with substance abuse and prescription seeking.

I don’t think you can get Molly’s book too many places, but you can order it from us or from her directly via FB. You might ask your local library to get in a copy; it’s from WordTech Editions, so can be ordered via wordtechweb.com, poetry editor Kevin Walzer.

And the last one I’ll mention here, a story poem called “First ER Shift,” when the senior resident asks Molly to stitch up someone, and she discovers it’s a woman who’s been slashed by a bottle. She’s a prostitute and the bottle was wielded by an angry client. The poem is less poetry than anger broken into pieces, and yet it’s very gentle in its matter-of-factness. O’Dell demands a lot from her readers, and offers even more. These poems don’t tell you what to think, they tell you what happened and leave the rest for you to piece out between the lines.