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May 20. TC Boyle, EAST IS EAST. Hiro is half-Japanese, half-American seaman who jumps ship near Tupelo Island off the coast of Georgia. There he terrorizes the island in a series of mad comical misadventures until he meets Ruth Dershowitz, an aspiring novelist at an artists' colony. Everything runs relatively smoothly until Ruth's hated rival arrives to wow the colony and two INS agents began to scour the swamps of the island in search of Hiro. Overwrought figures of speech fly about in typical TC Boyle style
June 3. THE GROWING SEASONS, by Sam Hynes. An American boyhood before the war. Beautifully written memoir by a distinguished Princeton literary scholar. He has an incredible memory for the details of life during the Depression. The life itself is a typical, even boring account of a lower middle class boy, but the skill of the author raises it to a high literary level. A few themes that I remember from that time: how careful everyone was not to waste anything, including food; how fathers kept their sons at bay (eat what you are given, follow orders, and shut up. My father would have added, or I'll beat the living shit out of you). Hynes reports a fascination with horrific murders. I don't recall this at all, but then, we did not have a radio or get a newspaper.June 21. HOUSE by Tracy Kidder. If you plan to build a new home in the future, read this classic account of building a home in New England. Kidder brings you into the lives of the prospective owners, the architect, the builders. A tour de force of realistic writing--even the names of the people have not been changed.Books I have consulted while writing short story Puppy Love (or the Dog House): (1) THE DIFFICULTIES OF BEING A DOG, by Roger Grenier. Dogs in literature, especially in French literature.(2) WHY WE LOVE THE DOGS WE DO, by Stanley Coren. Lousy title, but an interesting take on the dog-man relation, how to match up your personality with different dog breeds. (3) THE TRUTH ABOUT DOGS, by Stephen Budiansky. Dogs as con artists who pick our pockets , leaving us smiling. Dogs take from the rich, they take from the poor, and they keep it all. Sept 18. BALLYFUNGUS, by Mary Manning. A country town in Ireland, being swallowed up and poisoned by a shadowy international firm of greedy Germans and Japanese. All of the stock clichees of Irish life are trotted out: the upper class Anglo-Irish, now reduced to near poverty, poets, writers, studs, you name it. The best drawn characters are the lower classes, especially the cleaning woman, a gossip with a colorful vocabulary of exclamations, inuendoes,insults and curses. The leaders of the conglomerate threating Ballyfungus are pure cardboard characters. It is intermittently interesting and amusing. The first few chapters are confusing, because too many new characters are introduced.The author knows Ireland and the Irish intimately.
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