The Queen of the Tambourine by Jane Gardam

Dear Joan,

I hope I know you well enough to say this.

Opening from The Queen of the Tambourine by Jane Gardam.

I had the good fortune of not knowing anything about this book when I started reading it. Many books end up on my to-be-read shelf because of recommendations on book blogs, as this one did, only to lie there so long that I forget why I put them there in the first place. I decided to read The Queen of the Tambourine by Jane Gardam without reading the inside flap, just so I'd have no idea what to expect.

It turned out to be a little unnerving.

The Queen of the Tambourine is a series of letters from Eliza Peabody to her neighbor, Joan. Eliza is a difficult woman. She reminded me immediately of Olive Kitteridge, the title character in Elizabeth Strout's novel. Both women are far from perfect, not immediately sympathetic, and prone to provoking love/hate reactions in readers. Eliza is something of a busybody, sticking her nose into other people's lives, writing them little notes to give them a bit of helpful advice. Of course no one ever wants such a note which has contributed to Eliza's isolation. The neighbors don't like her very much, the people at her church dread her presence, the patients at the hospice where she works as a volunteer cannot abide her, and her husband is ready to move out.

Eliza explains all of this in her letters to Joan, who leaves her own husband to explore the world. Eliza's letters are very funny and very entertaining. They remind me of what we lost when we all switched to email. She is free with intimate details, with her own opinions and she has a very sharp wit. For a while I wondered if she would end up a novelist. Joan never writes back.

(If you haven't read the inside flap and don't know what to expect and want to keep it that way read no further here today. Just know that I recommend the book.)

Of course I began to suspect that Eliza is going a little mad right away. Sending a series of very intimate letters to someone who does not reply is generally not the act of a healthy mind, especially if that person is basically a stranger. How much can the reader trust what Eliza says? A madwoman can tell the truth in ways others cannot, and Eliza lets the truth fly. But the reader cannot be certain she isn't making things up as she goes.

Eliza has one patient at the hospice she is allowed to work with, a man dying of AIDS. He enjoys Eliza as she is, with her wild hoop earrings and errant way with local gossip. He gives her the name "The Queen of the Tambourine" because of the earrings. She says they are a gift from Joan. If he suspects she is going mad, I wonder if he sees it in part as a reaction to her situation as it was in Sylivia Plath's The Bell Jar. The two books are sisters under the skin. Had Ms. Plath's heroine married, lived to middle age, been a suburban London housewife, she could have become Eliza Peabody, The Queen of the Tambourine.

This book counts towards the Random Reading Challenge.

City of Thieves by David Benioff

My grandfather, the knife fighter, killed two Germans before he was eighteen.

Opening line to City of Thieves by David Benioff

What if you wrote a novel set during one of the most horrific battles of the twentieth century with more casualties than almost any other calamity in human history and everything came out okay in the end?  Almost everything?

David Benioff's novel City of Thieves takes place during the siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) Russia, one of the worst battles of World War II.  (Over 1.1 million casualities.  Only the Battles of Berlin and Stalingrad had higher casualities.  Iwo Jima had roughly 20,000 in comparison.)  

Heavy stuff for a comedy.  

That the novel works as well as it does is due to the two main characters.  Lev Beniov, the grandfather mentioned in the opening and the narrator of the novel's main section, is an inexperienced teenager arrested for looting the body of a German pilot who froze to death after parachuting from his burning plane.  While in jail Lev meets Kolya, a handsome, college student and would be author/critic  arrested for desertion, mistakenly he insists.  The two are due to be executed in the morning but manage to convince the officer in charge to give them one more chance.  The officer's daughter is to be married in a week and his wife is insisting that she have a real wedding cake at the reception.  If the boys can find one dozen eggs needed for the cake, the officer will spare their lives.

The two set out looking through the city and then the countryside for 12 eggs.  

Along the way they talk about all the things two young men would talk about: sex, literature, chess--sex mostly.  Lev is a virgin; Kolya considers himself a lady's man.  In fact, it is much easier for Kolya to find a willing partner than it is to find a dozen eggs during the siege of Leningrad.  Eventually, the two must go into the countryside, behind the German lines to find the eggs they need to stay alive. 

 I was more than willing to play along with the novel's premise, it's a good, darkly comic idea.  The two main characters are not exactly new, (Butch and Sundance, Thelma and Louise, C3PO and R2D2-- take your pick) but they are charming and it's easy to root for them.  While I didn't laugh-out-loud at them, I did smile quite a bit.  But I'm betting, that if you put your mind to it, you can figure out the book's plot based on what I've told you.   I'm not boasting when I say I saw every twist coming from miles away.  I'm disappointed. That the book has so few surprises in it's second half, is a problem.  What could have been a haunting story becomes a synopsis for a pedestrian buddy film.  

But in the right hands, and with a few changes here and there, City of Thieves could be a very good movie.  Something along the line of Seven Beauties.  

Short Story Sunday: "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" by Cory Doctorw

I've argued here before that apocolyptic science fiction is a form of escapist fantasy. What would it be like if the world ended in this particular way and only this kind of person survived? Popular author and keeper of the influencial blog Boingboing Cory Doctorow looks at what would happen to the internet if the world ended and only the people who administer the operating systems (sysadmins) of various search engines and internet hubs survived. Civilization may be falling, but people still need Google.

Mr. Doctorow's heroes, guys who advertize their nerd status through the use of t-shirts, are all on the job when the end comes. They work in a sealed building designed to protect the servers that form their section of the internet which now protects them from whatever it is out there that's killing everyone. The sysadmins do everything they can to keep the internet going. People may not be able to contact eachother via phone but they can still use email, still put up blog posts, and they're going to need to as things get worse, as civilization ends.

Because the sysadmins are able to connect with their conterparts all over the world, they are able to post regular updates on the state of things, to connect survivors with eachother and provide them some of the information they need to stay alive. Of course, they still have to fight their way past waves of automated spam which continues long after whatever it's selling has ceased to exist. In the end, spam will talk to itself, an undying conversation no one wants to hear, automated replies to replies to replies.

You can find full text versions of "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" as well as podcast version and a full cast radio play version at Mr. Doctorow's site here. It's a lot of fun. Maybe someday he'll write a story in which the world ends and only 7th grade English teachers like me survive. I can tell you one thing, that world would be quiet.


Full Disclosure: The cover of "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" is from Robot Comics. The photo of Cory Doctorow comes from TheAge.com.

Read the Book, See the Movie Challenge -- Suggestions the Sequel

I may be pushing this a little too much, but I'm kind of excited to be hosting a challenge for 2010. My first one after several years of book blogging. The idea is to read a book, watch a movie or television show based on it and include some mention of both in your review, whether it be just a line or two or a full review of each.


Several people sent in suggestions for good book/movie pairings.

Ted suggests:

• Howard's End
• A Passage to India
• Brideshead Revisited (The old TV series, not the more current movie)
• My Life as a Dog

Amanda suggests The Hours.

Theliterarystew suggests:

• The Go-Between
• Doctor Zhivago
• North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
• The Jewel in the Crown

Farmlanebooks suggests:

• Fingersmith
• Tipping the Velvet
• Affiniaty

Thomas at My Porch suggests:

• The Reader
• Babette's Feast

Biblibio suggests:

• All the King's Men
  

I thought I'd throw in a couple of more off-beat suggestions:

• Thumbsucker
• Little Children
• The Lathe of Heaven
• The Watchmen
• A Bridge to Terabithia
• Brokeback Mountain
• The Last Picture Show
• Pride and Prejudice/Bride and Prejudice

The Henderson County Public Library has a great list of books that have been adapted into movies here. I found this list on The Bibliophiles Lounge where Chase92 is hosting the 30 Books to Movies Challenge. It seems that Chase92 and I came up the just about the exact same idea for a challenge independent of each other. We even posted our challenges within the same 24-hour period. So if you're feeling ambitious and want to go for 30, please feel free to double count your books/movies here and sign-up for both challenges. And please visit Chase92's blog, The Bibliophiles Lounge.

The Read the Book, See the Movie Challenge starts on New Year's Day. For full details or to sign up go here.

Dakota's Favorites: Small Ceremonies by Carol Shields

This review first ran here in December of 2007. I'm always pleased to revisit Carol Shields, one of my favorite authors.

Small Ceremonies by Carol Shields is a little gem, a masterful chamber piece. It's not the grand orchestra of The Stone Diaries but it is wonderful none-the-less. Set in a Canadian university town in the 1970's, Small Ceremonies is a year-in-the-life of Judith Gill, mother, wife, biographer. Judith lives with her husband, a professor of Milton, her teenage daughter and her young son. Their family is haunted by the year they spent living in England in the home of an English university professor whose family spent that same year in Cyprus.

While in the English home Judith discovered the professor's collection of unpublished novels. She read them all and later used the plot of one as the basis for a novel she wrote as part of a creative writing class. She never pursued the novel, gave it up to return to writing biographies, but her professor and friend Furlong Eberhardt used her version of the novel as the basis for his only successful work. That's the basic plot of Small Ceremonies but it has little to do with what makes the book so wonderful.

What makes Small Ceremonies such a treat is Ms. Shields' insight into the ordinary, into what makes the simple events of every day so mysterious and so full of wonder. She does this without sentiment but with open eyes. For examply, one day Judith Gill searches through her husbands desk for writing paper and finds a drawer full of yarn. This is so out of character for her husbands that she can't help but wonder what is going on with him. Who does he know that kints? Is this evidence of an affair? The reader suspects all sorts of things just as Judith does, but she cannot bring herself to confront him about a drawer full of yarn. Judith's son Richard corresponds with the English professor's daughter each week, waits anxiously every Tuesday for the mail and the letter from Anita whom he has clearly fallen in love with though they have never met nor exchanged pictures over the course of their years long correspondence. One day the letters stop coming, of course. Judith sees her son's sorrow and also sees how quickly he gets over it and notices how the loss of the weekly letters actually helps Richard become outgoing enough to develop a small circle of friends.

Nothing huge happens in Small Ceremonies, just the unexpected things that happen now and then in an ordinary life. But these small surprises add up to an enchanting read. Carol Shields is the sort of writer who says things we'd all like to say, but didn't know how to or didn't know we needed to. You're likely to find yourself somewhere in one of her books, or someone you know. When you do, you'll see that even everyday folk can be the stuff of novels.

I'm giving Small Ceremonies by Carol Shields five out of five stars.

BTT: You Put That in Your Book!!!

This week from Booking Through Thursday:

What items have you ever used as a bookmark? What is the most unusual item you’ve ever used or seen used?

My bookmarks are very ordinary. Whatever piece of paper is handy at the time. If it's not paper then it's whatever will fit, a pen, a comb, my reading glasses. I've a few actual bookmarks that I use when I can find them--one from the Japanese Literature Challenge, one a student made for me.

However.....

This question gives me a chance to mention one of my favorite blogs, Forgotten Bookmarks. Forgotten Bookmarks belongs to Michael who runs his family's used bookstore. As the shops book buyer, Michael constantly runs into things left in books and forgotten. He posts pictures of them, along with the books he found them in, on Forgotten Bookmarks.

Here's one of his favorites:
I like this little postcard found in a cheap volume of Poe stories:

If you're looking for a little diversion today, stop by Forgotten Bookmarks.

How did you know I was in a funk?

Many of you know Lisa Roe from her work as an on-line publicist. She has sent many of us an advanced reader copy. Lisa has come up with a wonderful idea to break the winter/holiday blues. The Dewey Tree project is based on a simple idea--to honor book blogger Dewey who passed away last year by spreading the love of books and by using our books to help others.

The Dewey Tree project asks you to collect the books you have that you no longer need. Maybe a stack of ARCs, and donnate them to the charity of your choice. Local school, nearby library, charity shop, whatever works best for you. Take a picture of this, somehow and send it in to The Dewey Project.

Lisa's email arrived at the perfect time. I was in a bit of a funk and needed something good to happen to get out of it. Thanks.

Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol by Tony Scherman and David Dalton

Andy Warhol famously said of himself, "I come from nowhere," a claim that makes his spectacular domination of the art world over the past fifty years seem only more mythical--a character without a past, who conjured himself out of his own head.

Opening to chapter one of Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol.

Not everyone thinks Andy Warhol is a genius, but everyone knows who he is. Love him; hate him; be indifferent to him; he is one of only a handfull of 20th century artist just about everyone recognizes immediately. Recognizes and can probably call to mind at least one of his paintings be it soup can or movie star.

Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol by Tony Scherman and David Dalton is a highly readable account of just how Andy Warhol managed to become a household name. Mr. Scherman and Mr. Dalton limit their biography to the 1960's, the period that saw the rise of Pop Art and Andy Warhol's most creative and influential period. Mr. Warhol's childhood and young life along with what happened to him after the 1960's are covered, but focusing their biography on his most productive period allows the author's to go in-depth in the most interesting part of the artist's career. The result is a fascinating look at how Warhol's art came to be.
It's possible that his most well recognized work is still his first successful series, the Campbell's Soup cans. Mr. Warhol began as a commercial artist. For many years he made a very good living as a painter of shoes for a series of print advertisements. Once he began to become more and more interested in crossing the line into fine arts he also became interested in blurring the line between fine art and commercial art. Throughout his career her would force the art world to reexamine why there was a distinction between the two. As both a commercial artist and a fine artist, he continued to produce commercial art throughout the 1960's, advertisements for shoes and cars paid the bills for his famed factory.

The soup cans were suggested by a friend who was paid 50 dollars for her ideas. They created a stir right from the start. But they did not create sales. The series was part of Warhol's first significant Los Angelos gallery show. Everyone wanted to see them, and everyone had something to say about them, usually a joke, but very few people bought them, even at only 100 dollars a piece. Even in the mide 1960's that was a low price. In the end, the gallery owner bought back the few he'd sold in order to keep the set intact. He paid Warhol 1000 dollars for the 32 canvases, each a different flavor of soup. They were later sold to the Museum of Modern Art in New York at just over 15 million dollars.

While the Campbell's Soup cans did not make much money for Andy Warhol, nor did any of the art he produced during the 1960's other than the commercial ard he continued to do to pay the bills, it did make him famous and it did make it clear that he was a force in the art world to be reconed with.

Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol divides its attention between the story of how Mr. Warhol made his art and what his life was like. The authors do an excellent job with this. It would be more than easy to write a salacious, gossipy story of life at the Factory, the famed studio where Mr. Warhol worked during the 1960's, but the authors are much more interested in the story of Warhol's art itself. They are true believers in Warhol's genius as an artist and they make a very convincing case for it. I came away from the book with a much deeper appreciation of Andy Warhol's work and of what he was trying to do. Both the art and the ideas behind it are much more complex that they appear at first glance.

The last secion of Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol deals with his work as a film maker. While Mr. Warhol loses me as an interested fan once he takes up filmmaking the book still entertains. We get the story of how Mr. Warhol began making improvised films along with the ideas behind the films but, based on the descriptions of his movies I found myself agreeing with Pauline Kael, a film critic quoted in the book for having said, "So often after an evening of avant-garde films one wants to go see a movie." The authors do make a very strong case for Mr. Warhol's filme The Chelsea Girls as an important landmark in cinema history. They left me wanting to see the movie in its original two screen projection format.

I suspect biographies of artists have a very specialized audience, especially those concerned more with the production of art than with the more sensational aspects of the artists life. This is too bad really. Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol is a very good read. I found it every bit as informative and entertaining as Becoming Judy Chicago, which I reviewed here in 2007. After reading and enjoying these two books it's clear to me that I am a member of this very specialized audience and I suspect that many other readers out there would probably discover that they are too.

Full disclosure: I found the Soup Can image here. Ethel Schull 36 Times came from here. The still from Chelsea Girls came from here. I recieved an advanced review copy of Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol from the publisher.

Short Story Sunday: "Easy Street" by James Purdy

I've come to look forward to James Purdy's short stories. I don't read entire anthologies at a time. Instead I read one or two and then move to the next book on my shelf, which means I get to James Purdy two or three times a year. So far, I've been very happy with the stories I've read.

"Easy Street" is about an unusual relationship. Viola has lived with Mother Green for decades. Mother Green is in her nineties when the story opens, and has not left her large house for many years. Viola, some 30 years her junior, takes care of Mother Green and runs the house. The two have enjoyed a very quiet life together.

One day, a movie crew arrives on their block to film several scenes in a building down the street. The noise and clamour of the crew and the crowd of on-lookers it attracts upsets the lives of Viola and Mother Green. Late one night, a very good-looking, young black man arrives at their doorstep. The film's star, a celebrity sex symbol, he enters the lives of Viola and Mother Green, becoming a regular visitor. Both Mother Green and Viola are soon infatuated with him and are distraught when he eventually leaves town.

If this plot sounds familiar you may be thinking of Ladies in Lavender, a Judi Dench/Maggie Smith film based on a short story by William Locke. Mr. Purdy's story shares a common premise with "Ladies in Lavender" but that's about all. The two tales take a similar idea in different directions, so much so that knowing one does not affect experiencing the other. For one thing, Mr. Purdy's story is very southern, almost Gothic. The lives of Viola and Mother Green and their reactions to the young film star they meet are straight out of William Faulkner or Tennessee Williams. Either Faulkner or Williams would have done an excellent job had they been given the chance to write a screenplay based on "Easy Street."

If you'd like to participate in Short Story Sunday, please leave a link in a comment below. If you're looking for a short story to read, there are currently 333 titles in the 1001 Short Stories You Must Read Before You Die list. Please let me know if you have a story you'd like to add.


Full disclosure: The photograph of James Purdy was found at Poetry Dispatch and Other Notes from the Underground.

Friday Picture Reading #16

Cabinet photo of Spanish American War era soldiers. From The Cabinet Card Gallery.

I Have Needs, Too -- Booking Through Thursday

This week from Booking Through Thursday:

But enough about you, what about ME?
Today’s question?
What’s your favorite part of Booking Through Thursday? Why do you participate (or not)?

My favorite questions are those that spark the longer entries I written. Some of these are perfectly ordinary questions that just came along at the right time. Others are unusual things, or at least things I hadn't thought of before.

Some of my favorite recent questions:

Name 15 books that have stuck with you over the years.

Is there still symbolism in use in today's fiction?

How do you arrange your books when you store them?

What's a book you could live in?

I participate in Booking Through Thursday for fun. I enjoy thinking about the questions because they give me a reason to spend some time writing about books in a big picture fashion that ordinary review writing does not. I like having a chance to discuss some favorite books or some book related issue that wouldn't come up otherwise. Since I started including random pictures, I've been enjoying the hunt for images as well.

Due Preparations for the Plague by Janette Turner Hospital

Brightness falls from the air, and so do the words, which rush him.

Opening to Due Preparations for the Plague by Janette Turner Hospital

Terrorists hijack a Paris-New York flight. For days they fly from place to place, negotiating landing rights and refueling. At one stop they unload the bodies of several victims who've died in the extreme heat of the passenger cabin. At another, they release all of the children. Then the plane explodes over the ocean, killing everyone left on board.

Years later, the children have grown up and found each other through Internet chat rooms. One of them, Samantha, tracks down Lowell a single father whose mother was one of the passengers killed on Air France 64. Samantha does not believe all of the passengers were on board when the plane exploded. She thinks some of them were released during a stop in Iraq. She thinks the authorities have never admitted the full truth of what happened on Air France 64 or of the events that led up to the hijacking. Lowell has reason to believe her. His father was one of the authorities. Before he died his father left him the key to a bus stop locker that contains his last confession, several video tapes and a coded notebook that Lowell believes contains all of the details behind the hijacking of Air France 64.  Lowell's home is ransacked and the coded notebook stolen. The novel jumps from past to present as Samantha and Lowell try to find out exactly what happened on Air France 64 and to evade those who don't want the truth discovered.

It could not have been easy to write thrillers in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. (Due Preparations for the Plague was published in 2003.) How does an author deal with the still lingering emotions of a very real event while writing in a genre that has entertainment as its core purpose? Ms. Turner Hospital chooses to ignore September 11 altogether; she makes no mention of the attacks, placing her novel in a time outside of their existence. This strategy works very well. While the reader is focused on the events of the fictional Air France 64 hi-jacking, its aftermath and the subsequent cover-up one can't help but compare this fictional attack with the real one of September 11.  By ignoring September 11, Ms. Hospital makes it all the more difficult to ignore.

Though it's not about September 11, Due Preparations for the Plague is the perfect thriller for a post September 11 audience. Ms. Turner Hospital covers all the territory her readers want covered. She tells the story of the conspiracy that led up to the hi-jacking connecting it to the government which hopes to control the terrorists but cannot. She tells the story of the families of the victims and their struggle to deal with the hi-jacking's aftermath. She spares the children and she gives the victims a voice in the powerful closing section of the novel.

In Due Preparations for the Plague Ms. Turner Hospital has written a gripping, thought-provoking thriller that does much more than entertain its readers.

Fearless by Tim Lott

The Girl could hear sobbing from the front room.

Opening line of Fearless by Tim Lott.

In the not too distant future, in a totalitarian society, a girl called Fearless plans to escape the prison where she has grown up. She remembers, before she came to the City Community Faith School for re-education, that she had a mother and a grandfather who cared for her. She carries the mementos they gave her. Some of the other girls remember, too. If Fearless can make contact with their parents, they say, their parents will rescue them. If Fearless can find them, tell them the truth about the "school" they've been sent to, that they don't have enough food,that they don't have enough clothing to keep warm in winter, that they've had their names taken from them, then their parents will close the City Community Faith School and take them back home.

Tim Lott's novel Fearless travels deep inside Robert Cormier territory. While reading it, I couldn't help but think of Cormier's novels I Am the Cheese and The Bumblebee Flies Anyway and The Rag and Bone Shop all of which deal with children under the thumb of various totalitarian authorities. Fearless is not quite in the same league. I think it's afraid to be.

The main character, Fearless, refuses to submit to the constant, daily pressure to conform to all the rules of the City Community Faith School where she has spent the last several years of her young life. Conformity has its rewards. Girls who behave are ranked higher, given more privileges, placed in authority over other girls. But Fearless does not want to become an "A" girl. She does not want to be viewed as suitable for release; she wants to bring about an end to the prison itself. Sounds like The Chocolate War to me.

Fearless believes the only way the prison can continue to exist is that the adults on the outside do not know the truth about it. So she convinces the "A" girl in charge of the garbage, Stench, to let her escape by hiding in the trash cans that will be taken to the local dump. Fearless's attempts to escape and what happens afterwards make up for the bulk of Tim Lott's thriller.

Robert Cormier took a lot of heat during his lifetime for the bleak world view of his novels. Mr. Cormier did not think much of the world and his novels acted as warnings to their readers. Beware. This is what it's really like out there. This is what people will do to you if you give them a chance. Mr. Cormier wanted his readers to be angry at the way his books ended. He wanted them to be outraged, so outraged that they'd do something to make sure what happened in his books did not happen in the real world.

Mr. Lott almost goes the distance in Fearless, but he pulls his punches in the end. Fearless becomes a fable as a result when it could have been something more. I don't think it would have been something as good as The Chocolate War, but it could have been as good as I Am The Cheese or The Rag and Bone Shop. Instead, Fearless tries to offer its readers hope. But the hope he offers feels tacked on to a story that really doesn't have any. The book becomes the kind of comforting story that more sophisticated readers, even young ones, probably won't buy.

Short Story Sunday: "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was expecting P.G. Wodehouse. A story by F. Scott Fitzgerald called "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz." Sounds like a comic tale of wealthy New Yorkers, probably full of witty repartee like one finds in a Jeeves and Wooster story. Instead of P.G. Wodehouse, I found H. Rider Haggard.


"A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is narrated by Fitzgerald's standard middle class young man, John T. Unger, who has found himself among the very rich. The narrator agrees to visit a school mates family ranch during a long semester break. His friend, Percy Washington, has bragged that his father owns a diamond as big as the Ritz hotel. John would like to see it.


John and Percy travel to the rugged Canadian border, somewhere in Montana, to the Washington family estate. John soon learns the family history. The original Washingtons arrived in Montana from the south, slaves in tow, discovered a diamond mine that held wealth beyond imagination. Should anyone discover the diamond mine, which turned out to be a single diamond as big as a mountain, the value of precious stones and money itself would immediately decline to near worthlessness. So the Washington family set about making sure that no one ever found their estate. They used their wealth to keep their land out of the land surveys, out of all contact with either Canada or the United States and turned their ranch into a sort of lost civilization, much like the forgotten kingdoms in the jungles of Africa that one finds in novels like She by H. Rider Haggard.


Fitzgerald's story follows the typical plot arc of lost kingdom novels. We learn how the place was kept secret over the generations. We get a tour of the place so it's wealth and opulence can be described and its social customs explained. The narrator falls in love with a local girl, Percy's sister. Finally, the ranch/kingdom falls and the narrator escapes, girl in tow. None of this should be considered a spoiler, you knew it would all happen didn't you--it always does. What's fun about stories like this one are the details, the explanations the author gives as to how it all works and how it all came about.


But this is not the sort of story I expected F. Scott Fitzgerald to write. Nor did the Saturday Evening Post, which typically paid him 1,500 dollars for a long story. "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" was rejected as too long at 20,000 words. Fitzgerald cut it down to 15,000, but it was still rejected. It's not a very nice story--the Washington family keeps the source of their immense wealth a secret through intimidation and murder which may not have been suitable for the Saturday Evening Post. Fitzgerald eventually published it in The Smart Set and later in Tales of the Jazz Age.


If you'd like to read "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" by F. Scott Fitzgerald the full text is here.




I listened to a podcast of "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" from The Classic Tales series of free podcasts. You can subscribe through iTunes or visit The Classic Tales Podcast website here.


Full disclosure: The picture of The Smart Set magazine comes from the University of South Carolina. They have a good article about the story there as well. I found the picture of F. Scott Fitzgerald at The Luxist.

Read the Book, See the Movie Challenge - Suggestions

Sandy at You've GOTTA Read This thought it might be helpful if I posted a list of suggestions for my first challenge, the Read the Book, See the Movie Challenge. Many people like to post lists of specific books they'll be reading for their challenges though I prefer a more make things up as I go along kind of process.

In any case, I came up with a short list of possible book/movie combinations. Please feel free to list any suggestions you have as a comment or on your own site. I've tried to think of as wide a variety of books/movies as I could.

• Out of Africa
• Babette's Feast
• East of Eden
• Their Eyes Were Watching God
• All the King's Men
• My Brilliant Career
• Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
• The Hours
• Atonement
• The Laughing Policeman
• Let the Right One In
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Road
• The Lord of the Rings
• Twilight
• New Moon
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• Persepolis

I'm willing to include television series based on books in this challenge so if you're a fan of Dexter, Trueblood, or BBC adaptations, please feel free to join in.

To sign-up for the Read the Book, See the Movie Challenge go here.