This day in 1976, the number one song was ‘Afternoon Delight’ by a Washington, DC group – the Starland Vocal Band.
08
Jul
2021
Tom
07
Jul
2021
time for WEDNESDAY!
Bada Bing!
Everyone has heard of the historical figure, Karl Marx.But no one remembers his sister, Onya, who invented the starting pistol.
I’m so sick and tired of my friends who can’t handle their alcohol. Last night they dropped me 3 times trying to carry me to the car.
My wife is singing in the house.I’m sitting outside so the neighbors don’t think I’m hitting her.
You and your child are driving at night along a deserted road. You come across an old van piled full of money with the driver dead at the wheel. What lesson do you teach your child?Lift with your legs, not your back.
Adulthood is saying, “But after this week things will slow down a bit”, over and over until you die.
Today is the birthday, in 1940, of Richard Starkey, better known as Ringo Starr. During his long journey with The Beatles, he rarely sang lead but there are a few Beatles songs that featured Ringo. Here, he and Paul McCartney sing on the most popular of the Beatle’s songs featuring Ringo.
06
Jul
2021
Queenie
I just finished reading Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams. It’s marketed as a ‘Black Bridget Jones’ but it’s so far from that it gives marketing a bad name. It’s much darker. I initially had some trouble getting into the book and understanding the protagonist, Queenie Jenkins, but once I did, the book raced by and I really loved it.
Candice Carty-Williams, a young Londoner, has a flair for story-telling that appears effortlessly authentic. Her title character is a woman you both know and cannot forget. Queenie’s life is in meltdown, and as she goes through a miscarriage, a breakup and the loss of her home and her job, the depression and dysfunctionality that once lurked in her world rise to overtake it.
The book opens as Queenie and her white boyfriend, Tom, take a break from their relationship. Everyone but Queenie knows that Tom is never coming back but she keeps thinking that if she changes this or improves that he will. It obsesses her and she begins to fall apart, neglecting her work even while she fears losing her job.
It’s a haunting downward spiral. Carty-Williams manages to engage the head and the heart, plunging the reader into Queenie’s descent, while simultaneously helping us unpack it. The atmosphere is unsettling. Queenie’s South London neighborhood is shifting beneath her feet, gentrification pushing out the markers of her Caribbean-heritage community, a metaphor for the fragility of her life.
This is the fertile heart of Carty-Williams’ writing: complex dynamics of interracial friendship, of the gaps that exist between generations, layered with the specific intricacy of a Jamaican immigrant family and the blurring boundaries of workplace relationships, are spun into an entertaining seam. Queenie’s best friend Kyazike brings nonchalant humor, while her grandparents offer complicated affection.
But above all it’s Carty-Williams’ treatment of love and sex that darkly elevates her story. Queenie’s substitution of sex for intimacy, her broken body image, her vulnerability to the hurtful racial fantasies presented by white male partners and her battle with trust are all painfully real. Moments of awakening — which unfold at a sexual health clinic, in the back of a car, in an office toilet — are all the more touching for their grotty familiarity.
After losing her job and some of her friends, Queenie moves in with her grandparents and slowly begins to recover her sense of self worth and learns how to cope with some of the pressures she faces, so things are starting to look up at the end.
I’ve probably painted too bleak a picture of the book. Carty-Williams is a skilled writer and she injects humor and there are some wonderful text conversations between Queenie and her group of friends whom she calls the ‘Corgis’ because, after all, the Queen has her corgis.
Give it a shot. Queenie was one of Time’s ‘Best Books of the Year’ and NPR’s ‘Best Books of 2019’. I enjoyed it and I think you will too.
06
Jul
2021
TUESDAY, just feels like Monday
05
Jul
2021
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry
I recently finished reading The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin. It was a pleasant read – low stress, low risk, low drama and a well-told story. Zevin is best known as a writer of ‘Young Adult’ books and this is, I believe, her first aimed at adults.
The book is about a middle-aged man who owns a bookstore on Alice Island off the coast of New England. Fikry’s wife had died two years earlier and he is depressed, lonely and so much of a literary snob that his bookstore is slowly failing. He only stocks titles that meet is demanding tastes:
I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires.
In the first few chapters, his prize possession, a first edition of Poe’s ‘Tamerlane’ is stolen and he is about to give things up when a surprise package appears in the children’s section of his store. A little bundle of joy named ‘Maya’ appears. At first he plans to give her up to foster care but he falls in love with her and adopts her. At about the same time, he becomes interested in a publisher’s representative, a young woman who visits his store twice a hear to sell books.
I imagine you can see where this is going and so can everyone else. There are some exciting events, a few problems that Zevin quickly solves up and, at the end, everything is tied up in a neat bow.
There area a couple of gimmicks – at the beginning of each chapter there is a brief note to Maya in the form of what appear to be shelf talkers and expressing a love for books and for reading.
Zevin has written an entertaining novel that doesn’t pretend to be much more. There is a lot of love for books and literature expressed in the novel and it’s an easy and pleasant read. I think you might like it.
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