Category Archives: what’s on your bedside table

The Monday Book: THE MOUNTAINTOP SCHOOL FOR DOGS AND OTHER SECOND CHANCES by Ellen Cooney

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mountaintopschool-bookThis is kind of a stream of consciousness book, but it has three of my favorite things in it: cool characters, dogs, and a redemption theme. Evie leaves her drug rehab program without completing it and lies her way into a job at a dog rescue, run by four ex-nuns at the top of the mountain. At the bottom is Mrs. Auberchon, a basket case in her own right, who is the rescue warden and runs an Inn. She’s a hoot. You kind of wish you didn’t like her.

The dogs are their own characters, each with a story of how she or he was liberated or dropped to the rescue. What might sound like it would be predictable as a plot is written in such a quirky way, you really can’t always tell what’s going on. This is one of those edgy books that doesn’t even get close to sentimental because it’s too busy startling you.

Here’s a quote to give you an idea of Cooney’s weird, wild writing style: “Sometimes when dogs greeted a returning soldier, they’d go over the edge. They would have to take a few moments to run crazily in circles around the human, or around a room or a yard. I’d have to take a break from watching, so my brain had a chance to absorb what I was seeing: that there is such a thing as joy being bigger than the container that holds it.”

Two paws up, no opposable thumbs.

The Monday Book – Kind of

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The Monday book isn’t a book this time because Wendy is getting close to a deadline for HER current book, so Jack is doing this post and it’s a movie (because he hasn’t read any interesting books lately!)

I’m a sucker for memoirs and war stories so I was intrigued when Netflix offered me ‘The Railway Man’ – a movie based on a memoir of the same name by Eric Lomax. Lomax was from Edinburgh in Scotland and was captured by the Japanese army during the fall of Singapore during WW 2.

The movie apparently received mixed reviews when it was released, but I must say that I found it riveting. Lomax is played by Colin Firth and his wife Patti is played by Nicole Kidman – both, in my opinion, playing right at the top of their game.

The story is relatively simple. Lomax is fascinated by railways and after capture is sent to work on the notorious ‘Burma Railway’ (think Bridge on the River Kwai). He suffers terrible beatings and torture but remains focused on the railway he’s building. Finally, he survives the war but he is psychologically broken.

On his return, the only people he can relate to are other ex-POWs and he continues to be fixated on railways, traveling around the UK cataloging timetables and logging journeys. On one of these journeys he meets the recently divorced Patti and falls head over heels for her.

They marry and Patti sets out to rescue him from his self-imposed mental exile by becoming friends with his best friend who had shared the horrors of Japanese imprisonment.

That’s as much as I’m going to tell you, so you’re going to have to watch the movie or buy the book (which I certainly intend to do – films never have enough time to do it properly!)

My favorite scene, of course was a dream sequence where Colin Firth was knocking on a door in North Queensferry in my beloved county of Fife with the glorious Forth Rail Bridge behind him – the whole thing was worth that!

Four thumbs up – – –