april 2024 reading was different
Background for Writing the Conclusion of Custody
As you know from the beginning of this experiment in late summer 2023,
I have been reading as well as continuing to make referrals to you, and
other kind and generous website visitors. But this month my reading was
directed to how other authors of short novels addressed certain writing
challenges Custody was presenting to me. I am grateful to these women
and men whose work is shown below. Since my focus was so keen on what
I was doing, I am not sure how objective my reference is, so I am promoting
this month's titles a little less than I have been all along since June of 2021
on the List of Recommended Books on this website.
Adult Reading Changing a Life
I did enjoy The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett.
It was a fanciful, fictitious look at what would happen if the Queen of England decided in her later years to turn to reading as an enjoyment, not a work task or an expectation of her royal status. In crafting Custody I approached the question of literary versus functional literacy from the point of view of mental health, the weaponization of literature as a tool of social conditioning, and the importance of childhood literacy in and out of the school curriculum.
(c) 2007 Farrar, Strausand Giroux: New York, NY
Reminiscence and Memory
I found The Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes a very edgy novel. It won the 2011 Man Booker Prize. The story brought me along the jagged and treacherous journey of an older
man trying to make sense of, and peace with, his life. Episodes in the book made me uncomfortable at times, which was undoubtedly the author's intent. The final pages of the
book are shocking and stunning, but not unsupportedly so. In Custody's protagonist I was
trying to depict a man troubled by the unresolved problems in his marriage, which he is not
able to judge objectively. It was helpful to me to see how Barnes cast his male lead, and his
manner of relating to women over the course of his adult life.
(c) 2011 Alfred A Knopf: New York, NY
Little Girls and Boys Becoming Themselves
I was fascinated by Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire. Her creation of the setting for these various origin stories of not-yet-completed-coming-of-age experiences is Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children. It is a world of the real, spun into the universe of the fantastic --
by the imagination and trepidations of children and a select group of adults charged with protecting them from the bizarre and unforgiving. Writing Custody gave me a chance to invite readers to occupy the exile Linda Lowry dwells in at the Happydale Residential School, just as fictional but far less engagingly intriguing than McGuire's. Seeing her treatment was a helpful contrast while I was giving the spirits of the Lowrys and their adult and childhood schoolmates their place to grow and thrive.
(c) 2016 Tor.com / Tom Doherty Associates: New York, NY
Other Titles . . .
I regrettably ran out of time to read as many other books I wanted this past month.
I hope to go back to Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi. I am very eager to see how her novel
handles the use of fairy tales and story-telling to establish gender-equitable relationships and
to cope with, and transcend, the misogyny imbued in the history of that literary genre. One of Custody's primary attacks on gender imbalance and injustice is a weaponization of Grimm's Fairy Tales for adult reading and discussion by a women's book club. I am sorry not to have gotten more to see of Mr. Fox than my railroad ride through Connecticut to New York allowed.
(c) 2011 Riverhead Books / Penguin: New York, NY.
The only non-fiction book I had set aside for the month was Tory Hayden's chronicle, Just Another Kid. I am not sure if I'll go back to it for Custody's purposes. Her class of six especially challenged children in the UK is too real and child-centered for me at this time. So I have no
judgment to share or pass along after reading an insufficient number of pages to be fair.
(c) 2005 William Morrow / HarperCollins: New Yokr, NY
Hello and WElcome Back to Custody
March 2024
The seasons are advancing quickly. Weather patterns are adjusting to new realities. Reading helps establish a continuity with what our forebearers experienced, and thought about, what it means to be alive and coping with our planet and each other.
I invite you to look in on how Linda Lowry is discovering more about herself and learning how to survive in an environment of stress and exile. Custody installment six is now available.
Just go to CUSTODY - MARCH 2024 on the banner above.
And Thornton Wilder examines the same realities in his classic book this month.
Pulitzer prize winning fiction for march
Classic Wilder
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by Thorton Wilder
As in January and February of this year, the researching, writing, and
editing time required to create new monthly Custody installments
severely reduced my available time for reading another author’s novel.
So, in part, I looked for books with manageable page counts.
Whereas Lanny (January) and
Treacle Walker (February) were
published in 2019 and 2023, this month I wanted a heralded book
written in an earlier time period.
I wanted to be immersed in an elite
writer’s handling of intertwined backstory and multiple character exposition,
in a novel which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Incan Rope Bridges
The Bridge of San Luis Rey begins with the (fictional) tragic death of five
individuals in 1714, near Lima, Peru. The book examines how they lived
their lives before setting foot on the fated Inca rope bridge, built a century earlier.
Their microcosmic lives and deeds serve to pose macroscopic,
universal questions about the meaning and purpose of life, fate, death, family, faith, and love.
For all these reasons, which are related to personalities, actions, and larger themes in Custody, I chose Mr. Wilder’s masterpiece to suggest to you this month. I hope you find it equally challenging and inspiring to read for personal reasons of your own.
© 1927 Albert & Charles Boni, Inc, New York NY
© 2023 First Vintage Classics Edition,
Vintage Books/Penguin Random House LLC, New York NY
Incan Rope Bridges
Cinematic Treatment
Incan Rope Bridges
Qeswachaka, or the Incan Rope Bridge in the Cusco district of Peru. This was apparently Wilder’s inspiration for his novel. (Ayni Peru)
[Taking Up Room link - right panel]
Cinematic Treatment
Cinematic Treatment
Cinematic Treatment
Still photo from mid-twentieth century film adaptation of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
as reviewed on Taking Up Room link in the panel to the right.
Book to Film
Cinematic Treatment
Cinematic Treatment
Book to Film
One indication of the high regard in which this book is held is the long
list of adaptations to stage and screen the story has enjoyed.
Here’s a link for an overview
of four film treatments of San Luis Rey over a seventy-five year span.
read about joe and treacle
Spectacular Folkloring and Storytelling by a Master of the Art
Spectacular Folkloring and Storytelling by a Master of the Art
Spectacular Folkloring and Storytelling by a Master of the Art
Treacle Walker
Spectacular Folkloring and Storytelling by a Master of the Art
Spectacular Folkloring and Storytelling by a Master of the Art
by Alan Garner
This is the perfect short book for February, our briefest month. I have read the book twice so far. Once in December, again in January.
I am spellbound. The page size is reduced and the individual chapters that comprise the hundred or so pages are a perfect length to taste with
a hot tea or coffee mid-morning, mid-afternoon, or before retiring on a cold winter’s night this month. It is so captivating; you may even find you
have traveled the whole way from cover to cover in your same weather-homebound day.
Only three persons populate these pages; accompanied by the natural flora and fauna of the forest/bog setting, a train, and what appear to be common items of commerce endowed with magical powers. Beware this apparent simplicity!
Joe Coppock, a young boy, lives alone with his comic books and marbles. The elderly itinerant title character, Treacle Walker, arrives at Joe’s home in his peddler’s wagon. He becomes a provocative visitor and trades his wagon’s household wares for items from Joe’s basement “museum” of rags and fossilized scavenged animal bones.
Walker’s hawking cry as his pony saunters down country roads open the book: “Ragbone! Ragbone! Any rags!
Pots for rags! Donkey stone.”
Menacingly competing for Joe’s attention
is, Thin Amren, a humanoid renegade arising from his watery bog.
The story is told in sparse language and cryptic dialog. Garner spins a mystifying tale in so few words because every word he has chosen is muscular, adroitly
exercising to convey precisely all he wants to say. Most key words have multiple meanings to construct the many levels the story works upon.
For starters, Treacle’s very name is bound over with unexpected circularity from denotation to connotation,
in current use arising from an ancient etymology.
Joe is confused at times, uncertain if the lazy eye he covers with a prescribed eyepatch, is tricking him. What he sees and does not see changes frequently,
mesmerizing him by transforming mirrors into portals to reverse realities—envisioning avatar-generating comic books whose embodiments escape their cels and panels to chase, frighten, and threaten the boy.
Another man's View
Another man's View
The story’s climax—not to be ruined here by a “spoiler”—works on several different levels.
I found myself after the first reading, thinking I understood the basic tenet of the piece, that the relationship between Joe and Treacle is transformative for each of them.
But in my second reading, I had an increasing need to understand more about the literal UK elements of the items traded between the two characters, not the least
of which was the significant monkey stone.
I recognized the more I examined the story
the richer it became, the more magnificent the experience of reading it evolved, and my appreciation of Garner’s storytelling craft exponentially exploded.
You will be stunned by the energy of the images this tale spins within your mind.
Joe’s movement in place and time—across a landscape at one and the same time compact and expansive—
will evoke your empathy.
This tightly-written, coming-of-age journey of discovery starts in a place that will confound you at first and that
will astound you in the end, the first time you read it and every time thereafter.
© 2021 Scribner, New York NY
Another man's View
Another man's View
Another man's View
This book deserves more attention than I can give
it in this limited space. Rather than narrating the
movement of the story, I have reacted more to the tale,
to entice you to give it a place on your reading list, on
your nightstand, or next to your favorite reading chair.
Please treat yourself to the February 5, 2023 review of
Treacle Walker in the Forum section of the website
CHRONICLES: Science Fiction & Fantasy Community.
The review is by a person known as “The Judge,” who
has given Garner’s book an extremely enthusiastic review—
replete with a description of the story and his experience of reading and re-reading it.
But be forewarned. Read the book first, and then the
review. You will avoid spoilers and enjoy your maiden
voyage into Treacle Walker as a wide-eyed traveler.
And then, here’s the link to the review:
welcome back to the story of Linda Lowry's custody
January 2024
This is the fourth of the anticipated eight-part serialization of the novel Custody.
I hope you are enjoying the story so far and follow it into this new year. You are invited to contribute feedback and input to the creation of the novel (remember it isn't finished yet).
No AI contributions accepted. Send feedback to me directly at yeffahdrahcir@gmail.com
Read about lanny
Creative & Fun to Read
Creative & Fun to Read
Creative & Fun to Read
Lanny
Creative & Fun to Read
Creative & Fun to Read
by Max Porter
Lanny is a modern day boy living a quirky life in a mystical town
an hour's train ride from his dad's, Robert's, office
in London, England.
The village is imbued by a fantastical entity "as old as the earth," known in the folklore of the village as
Dead Papa Toothwort.
This trickster takes on shapes and animae of any of the flora or fauna or manmade constructs
he desires, to bring him close enough to witness and enspirit his village.
Five-year-old Lanny is seen and treated as an oddity by his age peers, his neighbors, his teachers, and even his dad.
Lanny spends his time creatively engaged with the discarded artifacts of modern civilization, the physical ecology of the town's sylvan surroundings, and the essence of Toothwort he seems singularly able to perceive.
Only Lanny's mother, Jolie Lloyd, a former teacher and current crime novelist author, and a fellow villager, Mad Pete, an outcast retired renowned artist have time for Lanny, and he for them.
Dead Papa Toothwort's, current iteration of interference in the lives of the townspeople follows a lengthy dormant sleep. It is his first active engagement with them in generations.
Toothwort's fixation centers on Lanny, the only person properly attuned to sense his presence in this infloranation as plant life, soil, air, water and spirit. Toothwort stalks Lanny, whom he welcomes as a sprite of a boy imaginative and curious enough to relate to Dead Papa on his own terms and mystique.
Creative & Fun to Read
The Ramble
Author Proctor wields immense folkloric power with enthralling storytelling language and style.
Typography floats across many pages, released from the stricture of typical arrangement by line, to convey the airborne snippets Papa Toothwort eavesdrops upon, as he shapeshifts from dirt-bound roots to treetop leaves.
The breadth of what we, and Toothwort, learn about the townsfolk and contemporary society from these verbal glimpses is staggering, freed from the construct of traditional sentence structure and normatively complete grammar.
Unleashed from standardized paragraphing, punctuation, and quotation marks to signal spoken words, the middle bridge of Lanny transports us into the minds and motives of the human nature -- from confounded, to forthright, to fickle -- of townsfolk and strangers confronted with Lanny's sudden, incomprehensible disappearance.
------------------------------
I gave myself over to the spell Lanny wove. So much so I was enticed to spend an uncommon fifty degree day, just after a rainy Christmas week evening, reading over half of this marvelous tale while alternately hiking and sitting in the forested Ramble in NYC's Central Park.
Awash in the scent of autumn's composting leaves filling the ground-foggy air, I could imagine Dead Papa Toothwort pulsing beneath my every spongy step and cupping his hands around the buried bottoms of the moss dampened boulders I sat upon, my consciousness seduced from metropolis by immersion within page after page of mesmerizing visions.
(c) 2019 Graywolf Press
Minneapolis MN, USA
The Ramble
The Ramble
The Ramble
New York City Central Park
December 2023
The Gill
The Ramble
The Gill
New York City Central Park
December 2023