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October 20, 2006
Books I Read in October
New Total: 101+
A Taste of the Sweet Apple
by Jo Anna Holt-Watson
From Publishers Weekly: Despite some uneven writing and wandering storytelling, this memoir is frequently touching and laugh-out-loud funny. The titular "sweet apple" refers to chewing tobacco, which a six-year-old Watson yearned for when she was a hell-raising tomboy on her father's Kentucky tobacco farm in the summer of 1942. She adored farm manager Joe Collins, who taught her how to test the soil by eating it, plant seedlings from a tobacco setter, chew tobacco and spit. He rescued her when she was stranded in a tree house and put out the fire when, in a rage, she shoved matches between her buck teeth and lit them. Watson inherited her temper from her father and grandfather, who were both prone to intermittent rages. Although Watson's parents loved her and each other, "we just never knew when things might come to a boil," and when life at home got dangerous, it was Joe Collins and Eva Belle, the cook, to whom Watson ran. The strongest aftertaste from this rhapsody about life on a Woodford County tobacco farm, with its horses, blooming crabapple tree, timeless summer and ubiquitous cigars, cigarettes and chewing tobacco, is of the heartfelt, old-fashioned loyalty of the hired help, and Watson's gratitude to them for holding things together when her family threatened to fall apart.
My Review: This was a strange sort of read--something definitely "authentic"--there was no professional ghostwriting here. It was like a book we would have been assigned in 6th grade, with enough discussion material (domestic violence, race relations, the "poor South", etc.), but not too much to get overly excited about.
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I Capture the Castle
by Dodie Smith
From Amazon.com: Seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain wants to become a writer. Trouble is, she's the daughter of a once-famous author with a severe case of writer's block. Her family--beautiful sister Rose, brooding father James, ethereal stepmother Topaz--is barely scraping by in a crumbling English castle they leased when times were good. Now there's very little furniture, hardly any food, and just a few pages of notebook paper left to write on. Bravely making the best of things, Cassandra gets hold of a journal and begins her literary apprenticeship by refusing to face the facts. She writes, "I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really rather romantic, two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied that she saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud." Rose longs for suitors and new tea dresses while Cassandra scorns romance: "I know all about the facts of life. And I don't think much of them." But romantic isolation comes to an end both for the family and for Cassandra's heart when the wealthy, adventurous Cotton family takes over the nearby estate. Cassandra is a witty, pensive, observant heroine, just the right voice for chronicling the perilous cusp of adulthood. Some people have compared I Capture the Castle to the novels of Jane Austen, and it's just as well-plotted and witty. But the Mortmains are more bohemian--as much like the Addams Family as like any of Austen's characters. Dodie Smith, author of 101 Dalmations, wrote this novel in 1948. And though the story is set in the 1930s, it still feels fresh, and well deserves its reputation as a modern classic.
My Review: I loved this book--it felt like a mix between the E. Nesbit books and Jane Austen. I was immediately hooked by the narrator, who--as J.K. Rowling puts it, is "one of the most charismatic narrators I've ever met"--and was delighted to find that it defied a specific genre and managed to mix in "contemporary young adult" with "classic Bronte" with a touch of "Umberto Ecco". Quite lovely indeed.
