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I loved this book. It took me forever to read because every time I picked it up, I went back and reread the previous chapters for the pure joy of the prose.

In Precious Bane Prue Sarn tells the story of what happened after the death of her father of apoplexy or stroke following an argument with her brother Gideon. Gideon takes over running the farm, determined to force it to yield the wealth that he believes he requires in order to marry the woman his loves and lead the life he is determined to lead. A good man and a hard worker, he is blind to everything but his goal and pushes Prue and their mother to take on additional work to help reach it. Prue is more than willing. Born with a harelip, which makes some of the villagers mutter that she is a witch, Prue holds fast to Gideon’s promise that he will pay for her disfigurement to be corrected. Only when she is as beautiful as a fairy, Prue believes, will she be able to attract a husband and have a family of her own, like other girls.

First published in 1926, this is a novel about life in a village in the Ellesmere district of Shropshire. It captures the sumptuous beauty of rural life in the pre-industrial past but also the superstition, brutality and terror, thus providing a realistic picture of what is often sentimentalised as Merrie England. Isolated on their farm next to Sarn Mere, Prue works in the fields alongside her brother and trades plowing for writing lessons from a neighbor, Beguildy, who calls himself a wizard and refuses to go to church—such a perfect name for a wizard! It is his daughter Jancis whom Gideon loves and plans to marry when he is rich enough to buy her a big house in town and take her to the Hunt Ball.

I love the strong descriptions that evoke the countryside’s splendour in summer and terrible emptiness in winter. Most of all, I love the way the author weaves them into the story. It is all too easy to drop chunks of description into the action, but Webb integrates action into the description and uses it to reinforce and illustrate the story. In the first chapter, Prue says, “When I look out of my window . . . I call to mind the thick, blotting woods of Sarn, and the crying of the mere when the ice was on it, and the way the water would come into the cupboard under the stairs when it rose at the time of the snow melting. There was but little sky to see there, saving that which was reflected in the mere; but the sky that is in the mere is not the proper heavens. You see it in a glass darkly, and the long shadows of rushes go thin and sharp across the sliding stars, and even the sun and moon might be put out down there, for, times, the moon would get lost in lily leaves, and, times, a heron might stand before the sun.”

I love that image of the heron standing before the sun. I want to quote the whole book. Every passage, whether full of action or ruminative, is so deeply felt. Now that I’ve finished, I can also marvel at the structure underpinning the story, something I barely registered while immersed in Prue’s world. I think I need to read the book a few more times to tease out the threads that tie the story together, the images and ideas that Webb presents with careful pacing that make the ending so satisfying. I love when an object or an image changes in the course of a story, echoing the protagonist’s journey. Paul Scott was a master at this. Here, for example, Webb gives us Sarn Mere in the troubling opening above and as the father’s funeral procession winds past: “. . . the only light there was came from the waning clouded moon and from the torches. But you could see, in the dark water, something stirring, and gleams and flashes, and when the moon came clear we had our shapes, like the shadows of fish gliding in the deep.” Later she talks joyously of the mere in summer, ringed about by oaks, larches and other trees, then a ring of rushes, and an inner ring of lilies “lying there as if Jesus, walking upon the water, had laid them down with His cool hands.” She speaks of the different types of dragonflies to be found at the mere and describes their struggle out of the old skin, staying still just at the end as if wondering if they could do it, before making one last heave and bursting free.

There is much about the fields, the way the corn seems to shine during August nights, and the woods and wildflowers. I’ve gotten distracted by the descriptions but there is plenty of action as well. The title is an oxymoron, of course, since a bane is something that causes ruination or death so one would rarely consider it precious. Hard not to think of Tolkein, writing at the same time. Prue only uses the term in reference to Gideon, and his bane may be precious in itself, such as the riches he works for, or it may be that gift that makes us reach ever higher and achieve more than we ever dreamed possible.

I'm just going to talk about this one story, though I am working my way through a collection of all of O'Connor's stories. One of my book clubs reads short stories, and this was one of the two for July. I hadn't read it since my schooldays, so it was interesting to go back and take another look.

It opens with the grandmother trying to persuade her son, Bailey, to take their vacation in East Tennessee instead of Florida. She summons arguments such as the children's previous visits to Florida and the reports of an escaped criminal called the Misfit who is said to be headed there. Bailey has little to say for himself, but the family does leave for Florida the following day.

First published in 1953, the story presents the family—Bailey, his mother, his wife and two children—as country bumpkins. The grandmother chatters incessantly about this and that, a habit which probably contributes to Bailey's gruff silence. His wife, whose name we never learn, has a face like a cabbage and barely speaks. Two of the children, John Wesley and June Star, don't seem to have ever been disciplined and are rude to everyone, while the third is just a baby. I bristled a bit at this stereotyping of rural southerners as dull and drifting through life, though I recognise the difficulty of shading characters with complexity in a short story. And, as one member of my book club pointed out, further detail about them is unnecessary to the story.

Only the grandmother is fleshed out. She considers herself a lady and makes a point of dressing properly for the drive in a navy suit and matching straw hat, trimmed with violets. After their lunch of barbecued sandwiches at The Tower, she ends up causing an accident, and the family does indeed meet up with the Misfit and his two cohorts. The Misfit is the other character who is presented in full. He is a brutal yet thoughtful man, who even as a child constantly asked about life and why things were the way they were. The grandmother deploys every argument she can think of to prevent the Misfit from killing her silent family. Most of the arguments have to do with religion and trying to persuade the Misfit that he is a good man and a good Christian. It is only at the very end that she sees him as a person, recognises the humanity in him, and responds to it.

One member of my book club thought the story was about which of the two was the better Christian and more deserving of Heaven. Certainly the two are held up as contrasting ways of being in the world, but I thought the story concentrated more on which was the better person. It asks how you recognise a good man or woman. One may be a Christian and one a criminal, but that superficial distinction is not enough. The real differentiator is the questioning. Only such deep thinking can open your mind and lead you to question the authority of those handing down the rules. Only critical thinking can enable you to recognise the humanity of The Other and to see beyond the facile friend/enemy divide that makes states build walls to keep The Other out, whether that Other is a Mexican immigrant, a Palestinian laborer, or a convict.

But those who run our society don't want that. They want obedient drones who think what they are told to think. The title comes up in a discussion the grandmother has with the proprietor of The Tower about how much better things were in the old days. Nostalgia is easily manipulated, as our politicians have shown us by getting us to believe in some mythical past when everything was better. I've often wondered if the American ideal of liberty and democracy ever really existed, even limited to a select group as it was in the past. I wonder if people in the agrarian past were more likely to think critically and question what they were told, a skill that was lost when Ford's assembly lines and associated control by the clock took over. Coincidentally, I'm reading a novel set in a small English village prior to the Industrial Revolution. I'll write about that next week.

Of course the danger is that such a person, a person who actually thinks and questions, might choose to ignore the rule of law and become a criminal, a murderer, a Misfit. That is the ambiguity that we are left with, as we try to sort out what makes a good man.

Detective Superintendent Grace is called out to the brutal slaying of the wife of a successful entrepreneur. The two were a golden couple, wealthy, golf club committee member, Rotarian. The prime suspect is, of course, the husband, Brian Bishop. Evidence against him mounts. At the same time, Grace is distracted by a reported sighting of his wife, who has been missing for nine years, and the resulting difficulties with his new girlfriend, Cleo.

If you like thrillers, you'll enjoy this book. The pacing is excellent, and there are many twists and turns. Unfortunately, I'm not fond of thrillers, so shame on me for not looking more carefully when selecting this book. I also don't like horror stories, so being in the heads of the women being attacked did not add to the story for me.

The narrative moves around placing us in several different heads. Our attention is divided between Grace, the murderer, the husband (who may or may not be the same person), the various victims, and a down-and-out drug dealer named Skunk. Maybe my brain just isn't agile enough anymore, but I found the constant diversion of attention distracting. It may be personal preference again, since I like to discover clues along with the detective.

However, local color of Brighton and Hove is good, and it is interesting to see the author explore the psychology of various characters. He does a good job with many of them—Grace's newly separated partner Glenn Branson, Grace himself—but Grace's borderline alcoholic and sex-obssessed girlfriend, Cleo, didn't ring true to me.

Writers can always break the rules if they have a good reason. In describing a place, writers are advised to choose one or two details that reinforce what you're trying to achieve with the scene. Yet, in describing Brian Bishop's arrest, James gives us everything: Bishop's objections to having his Blackberry and reading glasses taken away, how he felt about removing each item of clothing, exhaustive detail about the cell's appearance down to the material making up the washbasin. What the author achieves with this is to bring us fully into the baffled unreality of a person arrested and placed in a cell for the first time. It was interesting to explore how it would feel to be arrested, and I can see why the author wanted to follow Brian into that experience.

Brilliant, but not particularly important to the story, and of course gives a lot away, unless perhaps the man has multiple personality disorder. This kind of clue, added to the insight from the other characters' minds, meant that I saw the end coming way too soon, though I did keep listening to see how we got there. The themes of obsession and revenge are fertile ones. The author could have dug a bit deeper here, but perhaps I am asking for too much from a thriller. Maybe a thriller just needs to be a roller coaster ride, in which case this book succeeds just fine.

One of the perennial questions writers tend to rehash is whether or not to create an outline before starting to write. Many writers proudly announce that they have no idea where their stories are going when they begin; they follow where the story takes them and claim that this technique gives their work spontaneity and emotional depth. Other writers create quite detailed outlines and then proceed to follow them. I recently attended a workshop led by a successful author who mapped out her novels scene by scene and, posting this blueprint over her desk, checked off each scene as she completed it. The advantages she mentioned included a solid structure for the book and the freedom to jump around and work on any scene she felt like. Most writers, including myself, fit somewhere in between. I create an outline but feel free to revamp it as I go along. I stay open to the idea that the story will take off in a direction I hadn’t anticipated.

This book, which I so looked forward to, reads as though the author adhered to his outline too faithfully. It is a beautifully structured book, one of those novels that follows some artifact, like a violin or a manuscript, across the years as it passes from one set of hands to another. In this case, it is a house, a modern house built in Czechoslovakia in the 1920s by newlyweds Liesl and Viktor, a Gentile and a Jew. Their house is to have the clean lines and austere palette of the Bauhaus. An abstract house, the architect calls it, a house for the future based on the ideal of reason and the possibility of perfection. A house that does away with all the fustian of the Victorian Age that brought the tragedy of the Great War.

Of course we all know what is coming. That is one of the flaws in the author’s plan. One member of my book club said that she could hardly bear to go on reading knowing what was waiting around the corner. For me, if you’re going to bring Hitler and the Holocaust into your book, you’d better write a darn good story, not only because they’ve been so overdone, but because they seem to me the hallmarks of a lazy writer, coming as they do with their own built-in drama, their guaranteed heartbreak. It can be done—Anne Michaels succeeds brilliantly in Fugitive Pieces —but it is not easy. I think Mawer comes close, but ultimately fails to meet the challenge.

I found it a cold book; some members of my book club agreed while others loved the book. I enjoyed the book on a cerebral level. For example, I appreciated the masterful architecture of the story. As one person pointed out, literary ironies abound: a transparent house that is full of secrets, a woman who blinds herself to what is going on and eventually loses her sight. Part of the problem is the structure. As the house passes to other hands, we lose the people who have started to interest us and are given a whole new set of characters to get to know. Then it happens again. Perhaps that is the author’s intent, that we should not care what happens to the characters and all that Romantic nonsense. But I found myself thinking of Storm Jameson’s memoir that dealt with this period and was so much more moving. The betrayal of Czechoslovakia must count as one of England’s most terrible crimes. Here it is acknowledged but is only another example of passion trumping reason.

Another flaw for me, and this is just personal taste, is that I am so bored with stories by middle-aged men about middle-aged men who are justified in cheating on their wives. With all the passions to choose from, especially during this period of national fervor and lingering grief, it seems odd to go back to the same plot device over and over.

I loved the first scene, when an elderly Liesl returns to the house after decades in the U.S. Almost completely blind, she yet walks unassisted, the house so much a part of her that its spaces and scents do not have to be parsed for her to know where she is. I have a house like that in my past, one that appears in my dreams, that I can walk through step by step, calling up the smell of each room, the sound each window makes, the rough texture of each wall. Now there’s a passion you don’t see very often. It is more than love; it is immersion, and Mawer captures it perfectly. Many scenes in the story are beautifully done and, though the ending falls a bit flat, I am still glad I read the book.

Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese Zero, its gas tank hit, crash-lands on the small island of Nihau. The Hawaiians who live there know nothing of the outside world, unaware even that a war is going on. Although they are only a few miles from Kauai, the paternalistic haole owner of the island, Aylmer Robinson, carrying on his father's tradition, has forbidden newspapers, telephones, radios and visits from the outside world. He even discourages literacy and the English language in an attempt to protect the islanders, childlike and innocent in his view, from the wickedness of the outside world.

Therefore, the Hawaiians welcome the young pilot, patching his wounds and singing for him, though Howard Kaleohano, the man who found him, has, almost accidentally, removed the pilot’s gun and papers. While they fear his anger at finding a stranger on Nihau, they want only for the godlike Mr. Robinson to come and deal with the intruder. In mutual incomprehension, the pilot and the islanders crowded into Howard’s house talk past each other, until the elderly Japanese beekeeper, Shintani, is fetched. He listens to the pilot speak, but backs away saying that he does not understand the dialect.

The call goes up to fetch Yoshio Harada, a nisei hired by Mr. Robinson to run the ranch house. Though born on Kauai where half the population was of Japanese descent, Yoshio has suffered all his life, but especially during a stint in California, from the humiliations and abuses of racial prejudice. Only on Nihau does he feel that he has finally landed among people who accept him for who he is. This comfortable life is thrown into chaos when he is brought before the pilot, who tells him that the Japanese have destroyed Pearl Harbor. Yoshio comes to believe that the Japanese have taken the entire island and gone on to invade Kauai, with little Nihau being next. He struggles to decide which course of action will best protect these people whom he has come to love.

Paul tells the story, which is based on true events, in lusciously simple prose, capturing the characters, their dilemmas, and the hard beauty of the island. Yoshio’s conflicting thoughts and motivations are particularly well-presented. I found each of his disastrous steps perfectly believable. The pilot, too, a mere boy, is vividly drawn, as he is presented with a conflict between his simple belief in obedience to the Emperor and his desire to go home to his girlfriend. I loved his boyish enthusiasm when Howard teaches him to surf. I closed the book overwhelmed once again with the wreckage that war leaves in its wake, even is such a remote corner as Nihau. The hysterical response to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which Paul captures so well, is a grim reminder of what has happened in this country over the last decade.

I found myself thinking about paradises. Robinson, a devout Christian, believes that innocence—which he understands to be ignorance—is the chief characteristic of paradise. After all, it was eating of the Tree of Knowledge that got Adam and Eve tossed out on their ears. This is how he justifies his isolation of the population on the island he owns. While his paternalism is, of course, despicable, I wondered if the idea held any merit. After all, when my children were little, I tried to be careful in feeding them knowledge of the world’s evil, enough to protect them but not enough to give them bad dreams.

Yet for me, ignorance is the opposite of paradise. Even as a small child, I hated not knowing what was out there. The huge black holes in my understanding of the world terrified me, and I felt as though I lived in one of those ancient maps, where the earth is a small flat island, surrounded by huge seas that eventually cascaded off the edge of the world.

Knowledge gives us the ability to know what is out there. It enables us to think critically about what we are told instead of simply accepting everything at face value. It keeps us from being the willing pawns of men like the Emperor and Mr. Robinson. My paradise is not a lost one; it is one that I enter further into every day, with every new thing that I learn.

I hope many people read this novel, a small story, perhaps, of a handful of people trapped in a dilemma not of their choosing, but a story that has deeper resonances and a satisfying conclusion.

As Prince and Princess of Wales, Freddy and Fredericka are a constant embarrassment to his mother, the Queen, and to the nation. Obviously based on Charles and Diana, the two create tabloid fodder wherever they go. Unfaithful Freddy does not love his wife, who cares only about fashion, shopping and her appearance. His own appearance is ludicrous enough, but his misadventures and bumbling make it worse. His words are taken out of context by a mocking press, and he is made to appear ridiculous in the eyes of his nation and the world, while Fredericka is universally praised and beloved no matter what she does, even when she gives a flagrantly inaccurate speech concocted for her by Freddy. Eventually their misadventures become so egregious that they are sent on a secret mission to the U.S., parachuting into an industrial wasteland in New Jersey with no possessions and clad only in furry bikinis.

Yes, that's the level of silliness. I've long enjoyed Helprin's books, but this comic novel is quite a departure. In the mode of Tristram Shandy or Don Quixote, the book makes no pretense at realism. It employs the classic quest story structure, well-known to us from King Arthur and from fairy tales where the son who is considered a bit of a doofus goes into the woods or climbs a beanstalk and manages to rescue the princess or kill the giant. Coincidences abound and events converge to drive the story. The structure has also been described as the hero's journey, as Helprin points out in the interview at the end of the book on my Recorded Books copy. Famously put forward by Joseph Campbell, the hero’s journey drives stories like The Odyssey and The Inferno. After all, as has been repeated so often that I've been unable to find who first pointed it out (though John Gardner's name is mentioned most often): there are only two kinds of stories: “Someone goes on a journey” and “A stranger comes to town.” As Scott Myers notes, both are contained in the hero's journey since usually it is a stranger coming to town who calls the hero into action (the journey).

I have long said that I have reservations about novels that include real people as characters or even characters created by other writers. Legal questions of copyright and libel aside, since copyrights expire and people in the public eye or deceased are considered fair game, the writer is presenting his or her version of that person. Obviously it is unethical, except in the case of satire, to deliberately show a version that the writer knows is untrue, e.g., that distorts the facts to whitewash or condemn the subject. But I question even well-meaning attempts. The image of the person or character becomes lodged in our minds and part of what we “know” about him or her. Having read Laurie R. King's and Michael Chabon's versions of Sherlock Holmes, I can no longer read the original stories the same way, yet both King and Chabon are excellent writers who I believe genuinely try to honor Arthur Conan Doyle's creation.

Several of the essays in The Offensive Internet mention the belief that some proponents of zero-privacy hold, that today's exposure prevents people from presenting themselves as someone other than who they are and this is a good thing because it keeps us honest. Without getting into the huge body of work on the identities people construct consciously or unconsciously to show to others, I will just say that I do not think it necessarily dishonest to show different facets of ourselves in different contexts, any more than it is dishonest to wear business attire to a meeting at work instead of a bathing suit, unless you’re a lifeguard of course.

What I do believe is that it is our responsibility as writers to consider what “truth” we are lodging our readers' minds. Helprin's obvious admiration for Freddy and disdain for Fredericka (“less intelligent than garden mulch”) must inevitably color readers' opinions of Charles and Diana. In the course of their quest, Freddy comes into his own as a brilliant and well-read man, equally adept at wilderness survival and swaying the multitudes with his speeches. Fredericka, on the other hand, finds her best self in cleaning toilets. Her only talent is a sort of idiot savant ability to spout versions of famous literary works which she has never read. This sort of bias turns the book into a polemic in favor of Charles and—for me at least—diminishes the comic charm.

Still, I enjoyed the book and got a lot of chuckles out of it. Luckily I listened to it in the car, where the simple-minded humor filled the niches of my attention perfectly. I don't think I would have gotten past the first chapter or two if I'd been reading it. While I appreciate the humor of crossed communication, the who's-on-first sequences go on too long for me. In fact, most of the comic sequences go on too long. I admit I'm not a fan of slapstick or farce, so those scenes were for me a dead loss. Even for those who enjoy such humor, some judicious cutting would have made the book a lot better. However, I applaud Helprin's departure from the realist focus of today's fiction and his attempts to resurrect the picaresque stories of the past.

Langston Braverman has come home to her small town of Haddington, Indiana, simply walking out of her PhD orals and abandoning that life and all its dreams. She takes refuge in the hot attic of her parents' home where she imagines that she is writing a novel. Or maybe an epic sonnet sequence. In reality she is mostly sleeping and contemplating the wreck of her life. In alternate chapters, we follow the town's minister, Amos Townsend, whose life has been a series of losses, each more grievous than the last. Both Amos and Langston find their lives transformed by the appearance of two damaged little girls.

I love the title and spent several days just pondering the words before opening the book. Kimmel says of the book that it is a retelling of A Confederacy of Dunces. It's been a while since I read that book, but I can certainly see Ignatius J. Reilly in Langston. She's almost annoyingly smart, confounding family and townspeople alike with her lectures on abstruse subjects. I can understand why one reviewer felt that the book bogged down in excessive references to religion, physics, psychology, and philosophy, and Langston herself one of the “most self-absorbed and annoying characters in recent memory. Langston, who seems perpetually mired in surly adolescence, cannot bear her reduced circumstances, finding every aspect of small town life excruciatingly insipid.”

However, I enjoyed Langston. I guess it helped that I have been rereading some of the subjects she expounds upon. Mostly I just enjoyed the way her mind works. Reading Kierkegaard in the hot attic, her thoughts begin to drift. “Langston closed her eyes, and her mind filled with images almost immediately, as if she were beginning to dream. She thought of Hermes Psychopompos, who leads us over thresholds: between life and death, between sleeping and waking. As the psychopomp, Hermes carries a staff of intertwining snakes.” And she's off on snakes and women and locusts.

I enjoyed following Amos about, too, though I struggled a bit at first with disentangling my mind from a Midwestern pastor named Ames in another novel that grapples with large ideas. Perhaps my next memoir will be titled Haunted by Books. From talking about big ideas, Solace gradually moves into playing them out in daily life. I adored the scenes between Langston and the girls, loving the way they talked to each other. I could have done with more about the unfolding of that relationship and also more about Langston's father, Walt, who sort of gets summed up at the end. But overall I liked the book a lot, finding it smart and funny and unexpected, just as I always found Kimmel's blog postings.

I mentioned recently that I’ve noticed bullying and abusive behavior on the Internet, and that blogs that I used to enjoy have had to be shut down. I'm not sure why Kimmel abandoned her popular blog in May of 2009, but given that there was no warning and the end came right after a lengthy post on a controversial subject, I suspect that she was targeted. It's a shame. Not only was Kimmel's blog fun and thought-provoking, it had become a gathering place for a community of people, addressed affectionately by Kimmel as her “blog babies”. Losing this online forum must have been detrimental to her career. There hasn't been a book from her since 2008's Iodine and I'm not finding any interviews or articles about her since the blog shut down. I hope she's just retired to a quiet place to do more writing and is not in hiding from cyber stalkers.

This book attracted my attention because I’ve long been interested in issues around privacy on the Internet. I’m often horrified by how casually people reveal personal information there, naively revealing things like birthdates and travel information. I’d have thought that most people knew by now that once something is on the Internet, it is there forever, and that modern search engines enable anyone to find it. People may not realise that employers and college admissions offices will look for and find that photo of a keg party or blog post about a sexual encounter. Some folks I’ve spoken with say they have nothing to hide or adopt a fatalistic attitude, assuming that privacy is impossible in an online world, yet I believe it is important to do what we can to protect ourselves.

I’ve also been conscious of much bullying and abusive behavior on the Internet, directed especially at women and minorities. Blogs that I used to enjoy have had to be shut down and some newspaper columnists no longer allow comments because of the vicious and threatening comments posted. Martha C. Nussbaum’s essay goes into detail about the causes and effects of misogyny and objectification of women. Brian Leiter recounts two examples of what he calls cyber-cesspools and the methods posters there use to ensure that their harassing and threatening posts are the first search results returned. Anonymity certainly contributes to the level of violence, and it is shocking how badly some people behave when they think no one will know who they are and there will be no retribution.

Essays in this book, which grew out of a conference, explore offensive behaviors on the Internet in three areas: reputation (how easily it can be damaged and what the personal, professional, and financial repercussions are), privacy (how the Internet enables gossip and false accusations to spread outside of our local communities), and speech (what speech is protected by First Amendment doctrine). The essays concentrate on what legal and political remedies could be deployed to protect non-public individuals.

I’ve followed the arguments of the large and vocal contingent who want the Internet to remain “free”, i.e., unregulated, so it is good to hear such a measured and intelligent response. For example, John Deigh’s essay includes a discussion of the classical defense for freedom of speech, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, going beyond the usual quotes to put them in the context of Mill’s argument. I appreciate the precision of the discussions, where terms are clearly defined and recommendations supported by carefully crafted arguments.

The essays are well-written and—I think—easy for the lay-person to understand, though this is a field where I have some expertise. Many of the essays gave me new insights such as Cass R. Sunstein’s essay which explores how informational cascades and group polarisation contribute to the spread of false rumours. For all the talk of a “marketplace of ideas”, few people will go against the beliefs of their group or the opinions that have already been voiced. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in these ideas.

Set just after WWII, Mudbound is the story of two families in rural Mississippi. Laura is gratefully married finally at the advanced age of 31. Her husband, Henry, has transplanted Laura and their two young daughters from Memphis to a remote farm with only a shack for a house, as he fulfills his long-time dream to own a farm. One of his tenant farmers, Hap Jackson, is proud to be working half-shares, knowing that sharecropping would mean keeping only a quarter of his crop, thus guaranteeing long-term indebtedness to the landlord. Hap's wife, Florence, a strong woman gifted with healing, overcomes her initial wariness to help the floundering Laura adjust to farm life. Relationships between these characters and between the two families, one white and one black, are complicated first by the arrival of Henry's abusive father, Pappy, to live with them and then by the return of two discharged soldiers: Henry's younger brother, Jamie, and Hap and Florence's son, Ronsel.

My book club liked this book, finding it an engrossing read. Most felt the author deployed foreshadowing and description well to create suspense and keep them reading to find out what would happen. However, a few found the story predictable, and the suspense a bit heavy-handed. Some people thought the author tried to force emotional response by pushing obvious buttons, such as the Holocaust and lynchings. A few were disappointed by the ending, saying that the writing, while excellent in the earlier parts, seemed rushed at the end.

For me as a writer, this is one of the great benefits of being in a book club: seeing how personal preferences and circumstances influence a reader's reaction to a book. Someone beleaguered by end-of-term papers and exams to grade may not have the time or energy to read as attentively as at other times, or may turn to a book for relaxation rather than full intellectual and emotional engagement.

We all found the characters more complex and interesting than those in The Help, which is also about race relations in the South, though at a later date. Even Pappy, the most stereotyped character, has moments demonstrating his humanity. I found Henry the most interesting. He could have been presented as a classic overbearing husband, but what would seem like tyrannical behaviour today seems normal within the context of the times, and the chapters in his voice show not only his care and concern for his family but also his steadfast and practical nature. Each chapter is devoted to a single voice, alternating between Laura, Henry, Florence, Hap, Jamie, and Ronsel.

The characters play out the conflict between personal morals and society's mores. Those characters who try to transcend the overt and accepted racism of the rural South, still find themselves reacting in ways dictated by the local culture. Laura's great moment of growth and change comes when she recognises this dynamic. This same conflict is played out in other ways, such as the way society dictates family relationships. The story explores who within a marriage makes decisions and how children should behave towards their elderly parents, as Florence and Hap trade decision-making control back and forth, and Henry negotiates the conflicting demands of Laura, Pappy and his own heart.

Jordan handles the emotional connections between the characters particularly well. I was fascinated by how the relationship between Henry and Jamie plays out and the one between Jamie and Pappy, what they could forgive in each other and what they could not. My book club also talked a bit about the difference between an extramarital affair and an affair of the heart. We cannot, of course, control to whom we are attracted, though we can control how we behave with that person. The interesting question is how much is too much. The challenge is finding the line where innocent flirting or fantasizing crosses over into betrayal. We agreed that the great strength of the book lay in its depiction of the way violence is legitimised by the group environment, and the way a person's character is formed within the framework of his or her society, either dominated by it or reacting to it.

Memorial Day, honoring the military men and women who have died in service to their country, seems an appropriate time to talk about this book, third in Perez-Réverte’s Captain Alatriste series.

The story is narrated by íñigo Balboa, fourteen now, a young guttersnipe rescued by Alatriste in the first book. íñigo serves as Alatriste’s mochilero, an aide or soldier’s page, foraging for food and materiel, delivering water and ammunition to the soldiers. They are in Flanders where Alatriste’s unit has been sent to assist with the siege of Breda. The Spanish Army is trying to put down the rebellious provinces where "the conflict had become a kind of long and tedious chess game." The two sides in this long-running war are delineated more by religion than country, with Catholic Spanish and Italian troops versus Protestant Dutch and English.

íñigo is a good choice for a narrator. Young enough to feel the thrill of battle, his eyes have been opened by his twelve months in Flanders. He describes the mud and the rain, the patched clothes and worn-out boots. Because Perez-Réverte is one of my favorite authors, I was not fooled by the cover promising a swash-buckling adventure; I knew that the story would be more subtle and the characters more complex than that. There are adventures and battle scenes, but we see them through íñigo’s eyes, dazzled as he is initially by the romance, but gradually learning the stoic pragmatism and commitment to honor embodied by Captain Alatriste.

íñigo tells of how the army has not been paid and is near starving, given the way the surrounding countryside has been decimated by the long war. They actually have to mutiny in order to receive some pay, but as with every other activity in Spanish society, there are rules and protocols such that even a mutiny can be conducted and settled in an honorable way. In Alatriste’s interactions with his cadre of close companions, the officers he serves under, and the other soldiers we learn more about this fascinating man who says little and keeps to himself.

In the long stretches between actions, íñigo is learning from the men around him and intersperses his account with tidbits of history and descriptions of paragons of honor. These sidebars slow the story a little, but I appreciated the context they provide.

In the battle scenes, Perez-Réverte gives us a realistic description of warfare Seventeenth Century-style in all its brutality. Armed with pikes and harquebusiers, swords and daggers, this is face-to-face bloodshed, not pushing a button on a computer to launch a drone against a far-away enemy. Confused and horrified as he is by the chaos and bloodshed, íñigo still feels the pride and madness of the fight. Standing over the first man he has killed, all that he has experienced coalesces and he learns what it means to be a man.

I used to work with a man some fifteen years senior to me. When the U.S. launched the first Gulf War, he told me that he wished he were young enough to go. He’d fought in Vietnam, so he had no illusions about warfare, but was still caught up in the thrill of battle. I asked him how he’d feel if his then twelve-year-old son were a few years older and serving in the military. He didn’t have an answer. And it is not an easy question. What I do know is that whether I agree with all of my country’s wars or not, I respect those who fight in them and honor their courage and their sacrifice.