Indigo Lakeshore Book Club Reads: The House of Velvet and Glass

To say I did not enjoy the September pick of the Indigo Lakeshore Book Club is a bit of an understatement.  Because I am a rose-coloured glasses kind of girl, and I’m always looking for the bright side of things, I gave this book far more time than I should have.  Definitely should have abandoned it well into the first 100 pages.  Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in this book, and the main character acts so against her norm that I had a hard time liking her or sympathizing with her.

 

The book started out with such promise too, set on the Titanic, with lush descriptions of the main staircase, but the mother/daughter duo we’re introduced to are so lame, I was happy to learn they sank with the ship.  Sorry to be so harsh.

 

From the Titanic, we travel to Boston, and the daughter/sister of the drowned victims.  Mourning the loss of her mother and sister, Sibyl Allston turns to her mother’s favourite psychic in a desperate attempt to contact her mother and sister in the beyond.  Believing she has psychic powers of her own, Sibyl embarks upon the opium dens of Boston to delve deeper and deeper into her psyche, searching for her mother and sister and the love and belonging she never really had while they were alive.

 

The book has its positives, namely, Katherine Howe has a keen hand at description.  The Titanic and Boston’s seedier opium dens, along with those of China in flashbacks to the life of Sibyl’s father, come to life for the reader, but the storyline itself leaves much to be desired.  The numerous flashbacks into Len Allston’s (Sybil’s father) life as a sailor on shore leave in China, while they tie in with the overall story, are far too abrupt.  I often felt I was just getting into the story, following some event in Sybil’s life, when the next chapter, I was suddenly transported back 50 years to Len Allston as a young man in the opium dens of China.  Too many abrupt shifts in time are very disconcerting for a reader.  I would have enjoyed the book more had it been written in a more chronological fashion.  The other thing that put me off was Sibyl’s use of opium.  Her character was first introduced as a very proper, spinsterish young woman, who is suddenly thrust into a very bad neighbourhood by a loose woman – her brother’s mistress.  As she is first portrayed, Sybil would not have allowed herself to risk her reputation in such a fashion, in my opinion anyway.  There were just too many inconsistencies and too much movement back and forth through time for me to wholly enjoy this novel.  Add to that a fairly non-existent plot, and I was left wondering why I was wasting my time reading it.

 

As to my fellow book clubbers, I wish I could share their opinions, but unfortunately I had to miss September’s meeting as I was flying home from Colorado via Houston at the time, which is a whole other story…..

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L

Windsor Book Club Reads: Tuesdays with Morrie

Once again I am behind in writing my blog posts, and I think, in this case, it is because every time I start to think about what I want to say about our August selection, Tuesdays with Morrie, I have little to no interest putting thoughts on the page.  Why, you may wonder, or perhaps you don’t, but I’ll elucidate anyhow:  Tuesdays with Morrie is a tiny little book full of life lessons expressed in a simplistic, not too deep manner, which nevertheless always hit home with me.  It is a book that is firmly in my “love it” column, one I would, and do, highly recommend and because of all this, it’s boring to write about.  I think I’d much rather be tearing apart the next James Patterson failure than espouse poetic about a book I love.  And there you have it, my personality in a nutshell.  Ah well, perhaps I can redeem myself by getting deeply personal about a book that speaks to me on so many levels….

 

I don’t remember how I stumbled across the movie, Tuesdays with Morrie, starring Hank Azaria as Mitch Albom, and Jack Lemmon as Morrie Schwartz, but I watched it and loved it, and then discovered it was based on a book.  Off to my library I went to find the book.  The two are very similar so it was instantly a case of love the movie, love the book.  The story is a fairly simplistic one:  Sports journalist Mitch Albom spends most of his time chasing the story and earning money that his family and friends fall by the wayside until by chance he catches an interview of his old professor, Morrie Schwartz, talking about living with Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS.  As it would happen, his union is on strike, so he has the time to seek out Morrie and the two resume their old friendship, and Mitch is there for Morrie and his family right up to Morrie’s death.  In the process, Mitch learns many life lessons, not the least of which are to value the people in your life and to stop and smell the roses once in a while.

 

A cynic could read this and zero in on the fact that Mitch was out of work when he sought out Morrie, and if he’d been working, perhaps he wouldn’t have spent so much time with his former friend and professor, but I like to see it as serendipity.  Being out of work gave Mitch the opportunity to learn some much needed life lessons and ultimately change his life in the end, something he would have needed to be self-aware enough to recognize and embrace.  Let’s just say there were a few cynics amongst the book club group raining on my serendipitous parade, but I didn’t let that get me down for long. 

 

Some others in the book club had never read any of Albom’s books before, but had heard his sports commentary, and didn’t particularly like him as a person.  The thought that perhaps the book was written more as a money-making scheme than as a need to share a true epiphany was also bandied about, but regardless of how you think of Albom as a person, you hopefully can see the best of the book for what it is:  a celebration of life, not from Albom’s point of view, but from Morrie’s, a man who lived his life simply, doing what he loved to do best (teaching), and embracing friends and family so much so that at his death, he was surrounded by so many people he’d come to know and love throughout his long life and career.  Morrie’s thoughts on life and death pepper this book, and leave one with much fodder for thoughtful introspection.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L

 

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