Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity is the guy version of Bridget Jones’s Diary, only even funnier.

Rob, the slacker hero, mopes around his used record store, obsessing on the girlfriend who just dumped him and on all his prior failed relationships. Fanatically opinionated, phobic about commitment, and neurotic to the core, Rob is the Everyman of the post-sexual revolution era. There is a little something of Rob in all bad boyfriends and good husbands, which is what makes him so appealing.

Read the rest of the review on Rose City Reader.

In his first novel, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, Michael Dorris tells the entwined stories of three generations of American Indian women. The first section is told by 15 year old Rayona, the second by Rayona’s mother Christine, and the third by Christine’s mother Ida.

The theme is the braiding together of the lives of these three headstrong women and their extended families. Parts of each story show up in the others, with the same scenes told from a different perspective at the same time new material is brought in by each narrator. While not a unique approach, Dorris handles it well.

The problem is . . .

Read the rest of the review posted on Rose City Reader.

The Wind in the Willows is as daffy and charming as it must have seemed when it was first published in 1908. Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s novel follows the anthropomorphic adventures of several woodland creatures, primarily Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad.

They enjoy many pastimes, including “messing about in boats,” Christmas caroling, and driving motor cars. This last becomes Mr. Toad’s passion, landing him in all sorts of trouble and, eventually, a dungeon. The animals have many adventures along the river and in the Wild Wood, but they all love home best, where they like to cozy up in front of a fireplace and enjoy simple meals with friends.

Full review posted on Rose City Reader.

The Wind in the Willows is as daffy and charming as it must have seemed when it was first published in 1908. Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s novel follows the anthropomorphic adventures of several woodland creatures, primarily Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad.

They enjoy many pastimes, including “messing about in boats,” Christmas caroling, and driving motor cars. This last becomes Mr. Toad’s passion, landing him in all sorts of trouble and, eventually, a dungeon. The animals have many adventures along the river and in the Wild Wood, but they all love home best, where they like to cozy up in front of a fireplace and enjoy simple meals with friends.

Full review posted on Rose City Reader.

Advise and Consent, Allen Drury’s 1959 Pulitzer winner, thoroughly covers the machinations of the Senate confirmation process as that august body deliberates the nomination of a controversial figure for the post of Secretary of State. Although long and sometimes exhausting, Drury’s landmark novel is a rewarding book for the patient reader.

At over 600 dense pages, this is not a quick read. The first 100 pages seem especially slow as the characters are introduced and the stage set. This behind-the-scenes look at the Senate may have been more interesting before 50 years of televised politics in general and C-SPAN in particular leached any tantalizing mystery out of Senate subcommittee hearings.

Once the story builds up steam, however, it powers right along. The candidate under consideration, peacenik Bob Leffingwell, has his avid supporters, including the somewhat Machiavellian President who nominated him. But he faces stiff opposition from those who think he will be unable to protect America on the brink of a nuclearized Cold War with an increasingly belligerent Soviet Union determined to send men to the moon to claim it as Soviet territory. While the details of the controversy seem anachronistic now, the underlying issue of diplomacy versus military might is as pertinent today as it was 50 years ago.

The rest of the review is posted on Rose City Reader.

The trouble with novels about the Civil War is that they are bound to follow a requisite formula, and Geraldines Brooks’s Pulitzer-winning March is no exception. All the familiar scenes, themes, and elements are there: lonely letters home, the smoke-filled chaos of battle, stealing a dead person’s boots, whipping a slave, selling a slave’s family members, a slave revolt, Southern gentility, Northern rough manners, soldiers trashing the plantation, buildings burning, having no food but root vegetables, and the mandatory amputation of limbs with hand tools.

Full review posted on Rose City Reader.

German-born, Oxford-educated journalist, Oliver August, spent seven years tracking the story of Chinese businessman/gangster/fugitive Lai Changxing in order to write Inside the Red Mansion: On the Trail of China’s Most Wanted Man. By the time August arrived in China in 1999 as a London Times reporter, Lai was already on the lam, the subject of a massive criminal investigation by the Chinese government.

August followed Lai’s trail geographically, socially, and mythically – renting an apartment in Xiamen, Lai’s home base; visiting the Lai’s pleasure palace, the Red Mansion; talking to anyone he could find who ever met Lai; and parsing internet rumors of Lai that painted him as either the greatest entrepreneur of modern China, a Mafioso-style criminal, or a Robin Hood combination of both.

Complete review posted on Rose City Reader.

Published in 1956, The Floating Opera was John Barth’s first novel and a finalist for the National Book Award.

According to the back cover, The Floating Opera is, ‘among many curious things’:

the story of the day when Todd Andrews, hero and narrator, confirmed bachelor, convinced nihilist, practicing lawyer, rake, saint, cynic and potential suicide, decides not to commit suicide.

Like other books that supposedly take place in one day – most famously, Ulysses; more recently, Saturday – Barth’s novel really tells the story of Andrews’s entire life, including the loss of his virginity, his macabre WWI experience, the death of his father, and the long-running affair with the wife of his best friend.

In classic picaresque tradition, Barth uses humor and adventure to examine the most serious of subjects. And he succeeds – it is funny, primarily in Barth’s clever wordplay and in the juxtaposition of ordinary, small town life such as the old men murmuring away the day on the sunny bench outside the general store or the audience appreciation of the rinky-dink showboat vaudeville show, and the extraordinary issues Andrews faces as he plans his suicide, such as the nature of marital fidelity and the value of life.

Barth is best known for The Sot Weed Factor (which made the All Time-100 list) and Giles Goat-Boy (one of Anthony Burgess’s 99 favorites). Floating Opera is far shorter than either of the others makes for an accessible introduction to an author vaunted in post-grad lit programs but not often popularly read.

Also posted on Rose City Reader.

The Stettheimer Dollhouse is a little gem, appropriate enough for a book about miniature art. The dollhouse itself – designed by, built for, and painstakingly decorated by Carrie Stettheimer from 1916 to 1935 – is itself a work of art. It is also, to its lasting fame, filled with actual paintings and sculptures created for Stettheimer by some of the leading artists of her day.

The dollhouse is in the permanent collection of the Museum of the City of New York. The book is a small catalog of the dollhouse exhibit, filled mostly with pictures, with written descriptions of each room of the dollhouse. There is also a preface by the museum curator, a brief history of the dollhouse by Sheila Clark, and a reprint of the original remarks written by Stettheimer’s sister Ettie when she donated the dollhouse to the museum after Carrie’s death.

What the book was not intended to provide but noticeably lacks is an in-depth biography of Stettheimer. She and two sisters never married, the three living with their mother in Europe and New York. Florine was an artist who only came to modest fame after her death. Her enchanting portrait of Carrie is reproduced in the book and a black and white miniature version hangs framed in the dollhouse dining room. Ettie was an author. Unfortunately for her own creative endeavors, the role of house manager and hostess fell to Carrie, who devoted her energies to running the house for the four women and hosting “one of the most notable literary and artistic salons of early twentieth-century New York society.” Carrie’s dollhouse was her only artistic outlet.

These sketchy details create a melancholy picture. Hopefully someone will pick up where this book leaves off and write a definitive biography of the Stettheimer sisters. In the meantime, The Stettheimer Dollhouse is a charming introduction to this distinctive family.

Also posted on Rose City Reader.

Red Square is the third book in Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko series, following Renko’s introduction in Gorky Park and Siberian exile in Polar Star. In Red Square, Renko is back in Moscow, reinstated as an investigator with the militia. His efforts to discover the killer of a black market financier lead him to the world of high-stakes art smuggling, the Munich studios of Radio Liberty, and the arms of his lost love Irina.

Full review posted on Rose City Reader.