Trustee From the Toolroom

 

by Nevil Shute (read by Frank Muller)

an annual re-read

 

You don't have to be rich and ambitious to be happy or successful in life

Nevil Shute was the last author that I added to my annual re-read list. I had read Shute many, many years ago and remembered that I had liked what I had read. I can't remember how it was that I got back into reading his books on audio. Maybe it was a sale pile. Maybe it was a day when I was looking for something different to read and Shute's name came to mind. In any case, this was the first Shute on audio that I added to my library -- and it has become my favorite. It was his last book and it was published posthumously.

Keith Stewart is a quiet, unassuming man living a quiet life with his wife in the shabby suburb of Ealing. He writes a column in a hobby magazine, The Miniature Mechanic, giving step by step instructions to hobbyists around the world for how to build miniature mechanical marvels in their home workshops. He is content with life and asks for nothing more. When his sister and her husband die at sea, the Stewarts become guardian of their 10 year old daughter and trustee of her estate. It falls on Stewart's shoulders to go halfway around the world to retrieve the legacy, which was on the yacht when it went down on a coral reef off an uninhabited Pacific island.

Trustee From the Toolroom is mostly about how the less than worldly-wise Keith Stewart, manages to get from London to Tahiti and back and the people he meets along the way.

Five stars. Read this book and have your faith in humanity restored.

The House of Broken Angels

 

 

 

by Luis Alberto Urrea (read by the author)

First posted on BookLikes, October 20, 2018

 

 

 

 

When I first read the description of this book, the first thing that came to mind was a book I read about 15 years ago, about another Mexican patriarch on his death dead, La Muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) by Carlos Fuentes. As I started the book, I realized that I was indeed reading the death bed story/confession(?) of the next generation.

There were the subtle similarities, very similar clan surnames (Cruz vs. de la Cruz), similar character names (Artemio Cruz vs Antonio de la Cruz), similar narration techniques and multiple narrators and points of view. However, Urrea's story, while perhaps an homage to Fuentes, is very much the story of the 21st century Mexican-Americans--the boomers, the millenials, the genXers-- those a generation or two on from the characters Fuentes wrote about. It is a story about assimilation, about working to hard to provide for one's family and to give the next generation a leg up in the world. It is about the bonds of family, the strength of women, the changing mores not just of the barrio but of society in general. And you get the gist.

I never read books narrated by the author (unless they are read by an actor) but after reading the reviews, I decided to go for it. Urrea reads beautifully. His voices and pronunciations were spot on--in both languages.I don't think any other narrator could have done the story justice.

My only disappointment in the whole book was what I felt was a weak ending and that maybe it was one last coda too many. But honestly, that does not stop me from recommending this book.

 

Join Me For a Don Quixote Readathon

It is time for another reading of  El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. I just acquired an audio edition of the Edith Grossman translation (read by George Guidall, one of my favorite audiobooks readers) and it is finally time to dust it off and listen. Yes, I am reading in English. I have never had the patience to read dense prose in Spanish. But I will have a Spanish edition nearby, just in case. 

 

I have jumped on the Don Quixote bandwagon. It is one of the best books I have ever read. In its day, it was boundary breaker. Nobody had every written like this, especially not in Spain, where one had to be so careful of what one was saying lest one be hauled before the Inquisition. So much of what we take for granted today, was new ground for readers. Ostensibly, the book was written to discredit books of chivalry, the Harlequin Romance novels of the 15th and 16th centuries. In truth, discrediting books of chivalry was just the jumping off point for critiquing so much more; speaking through the mind and mouth of a crazy person was just a way of getting passed the censor. Yes, the censors. Every book that was published in Spain had to be approved by the Inquisition before it could be published.

 

If you are reading along with me or when you finally decide that you are going to read it, please do yourself a favor: forget Man of La Mancha; forget what you think you know about the story; forget what you may have seen on TV or in the movies. Go into the reading of it with a blank slate. What you are reading was a new kind of storytelling. The artifices of plot and story arc, setting, character development are new ideas still being defined. The borderlines between fact and fiction are fluid; in fact, in Spanish the word for "story" and the word for "history" are one and the same, historia. This is what the novel looked like in its infancy; it was still learning.