Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley

I know I'm catching the tail end, but I did want to write a quick post about the only novella I was able to manage this month for the August Art of the Novella Challenge.  I think I ended up checking five different novellas out of the library, but I was only able to finish one.  But it was delightful!  If you're looking for a quick, fun read, this is one I'd highly recommend.  It's a book about book lovers, and it's just 124 pages!

Published in 1917, Parnassus on Wheels is the prequel to Christopher Morley's The Haunted Bookshop.  It's the story of Helen McGill, a 39-year-old spinster living with her brother on a farm in upstate New York.  Her brother, Andrew McGill, is a well-regarded writer who purchased the farm after his business failed.  Their departure to rural life inspired Andrew to write several popular books on the glories of country living and simpler times, etc, etc.  However, now that Andrew is A Famous Novelist, he tends to wander off in search of new material, leaving her to carry on all the everyday work.

One day, a funny little man with a traveling caravan approaches the farm while Andrew is out.  He is Roger Mifflin, the owner of a traveling bookshop, the eponymous Parnassus on Wheels, and he's ready to settle down.  Roger thinks that Andrew is the perfect person to buy Parnassus lock, stock and barrel, but Helen has had enough.  She knows that Andrew will buy the caravan and leave her again, carrying on all the responsibilities of the farm and the house while he's off gallivanting.  She decides it's time she had her own adventures.  Much to her brother's chagrin, she buys Parnassus for herself and takes off to make her fortune and spread the gospels of good literature to the masses.

This is a really fun book.  Helen is a spunky heroine, Roger is quirky and charming, and hilarity ensues. Plus, there's lots of discussion and descriptions about great books.  How could a bibliophile like myself not fall for a book with this quote:

"Lord!" he said, "when you sell a man a book you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue -- you sell him a whole new life.  Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night -- there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean!"

What is not to love?  I finished the book in practically one sitting, and now I'm waiting for the sequel, The Haunted Bookshop, to arrive at my library branch.  

The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman

The Cookbook Collector is described by the publisher as a "modern take on Jane Austen."  Le sigh.  As I have mentioned in previous postings, I am not a huge fan of authors borrowing plots and characters from classic lit.  (Or contemporary lit, for that matter, but I don't see it much due to copyrights).  In fact, I probably would have avoided The Cookbook Collector like the plague, except that A) the title includes the word cookbook, which always makes me perk up my ears since I adore food fiction; and B) -- and this is the real shocker -- my husband mentioned that he wanted to read it.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My husband is a wonderful person and a loving and supportive spouse, but contemporary lit is not his cup of tea.  Apparently he was listening to a review on NPR that compared it to Dostoevsky.  Well!!!  I marched right over to the computer and put my name on the library's hold list.  Sadly, this book bears little resemblance to Jane Austen; I haven't actually read Dostoevsky (he's on my to-read list, I swear), but I'm guessing not so much like his writing either.  Not that it's a bad book, but if you're looking for Jane Austen's trademark wit, you're out of luck.

Note:  if you have not read Sense and Sensibility, there may be spoilers below.  If you have read it, then there may be spoilers for The Cookbook Collector.   

To her credit, Ms. Goodman doesn't really stick that closely to a Jane Austen plot.  The two main characters are very loosely based on the Dashwood sisters from Sense and Sensibility, but just in that the older sister, Emily, is practical, like Elinor, and younger sister Jess is emotional and passionate like Marianne.  That's pretty much it.  Well,  Jess does have an older man who is attracted to her, and she does have an unhappy relationship with a young environmentalist, but it's really very little like the romance between Willoughby and Marianne like in S&S.  Jess, a graduate student, has a part-time job working for a rare book dealer, George.  The title of the book comes from an appraisal job George and Jess are working on, a collection left to a slightly eccentric woman by her even more eccentric uncle, who has a basically priceless collection of old and valuable cookbooks.  As Jess begins to explore and research the amazing collection, she discovers deeper feelings for George, and we all know how their story ends.

The Emily story was much more disappointing.  I suppose I would have liked it more if I hadn't expected it to be remotely related to Sense & Sensibility, which it really isn't, just that Emily is level-headed and practical like Elinor.  She's a dot-com millionaire!  How is this related to Jane Austen???

Seriously, the whole idea of a modern update of Jane Austen is really a stretch for me.  One of the dominant themes in every one of Austen's works is that women had to marry well because they had no other choices, and that just doesn't apply any more, at least not in Western culture.  Now, if you moved the action to the Middle East, I would probably find it much more believable.  Back in Regency times, if a woman of Jane Austen's class didn't have a dowry and couldn't find a rich husband, she was faced with few choices: marrying beneath her; becoming a governess; or becoming a spinster dependent upon her family's charity.  Nowadays women can pull themselves up by their high-heeled Manolo bootstraps and be pretty much anything they want, despite the glass ceiling.

This book also has a bunch of side stories about the dot-com bubble, backstabbing corporate politics; September 11 (again, not a spoiler if you notice that this book is set in the late 1990s); Judaism; long-lost relatives and family identity.  I really wish this book had focused more on the cookbook collector plot, since to me it was the most interesting part of the book -- not just the food-related aspects, but the relationship between Jess and George.  Of course, I also have a library degree, so I found the research into the rare books fascinating;  it's making me contemplate a return to school for classes in preservation and rare-book handling.  In general, I just think there was just too much going on, and not really Austenish at all. If this book hadn't been described that way, I probably would have liked it a lot more.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

People of the Book is a lot of things. It has a mystery, historical fiction from several eras, Jewish history, and strained mother/daughter relationship, and even a little love story.  Plus, a lot of great stuff for people who love books (Brooks was even kind enough to dedicate this book to librarians, which I found very touching).

The narrator of the book is Hanna Heath, a thirtyish Australian and master book conservator who has the amazing task of studying and preserving the Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautiful illuminated manuscript..  [The Haggadah is a real book, and it really was saved by a librarian during the war.  If you want to read more about it, and see actual photos, click here. Of course, this story is fictional]. The story begins in Sarajevo in the 1990s, during the Bosnian war.  This Haggadah, a priceless relic of Jewish history, was feared destroyed in the bombing of Sarajevo and has resurfaced.  As Hanna begins to examine and preserve the book, she finds tiny clues about the book's amazing story.  It's not told in chapters, but in sections divided by date and location, with different characters who figure in the history of the book.  The historical sections are interspersed with Hanna's discoveries about the mysterious history of the book, and start with 1940s in Sarajevo, then work backward to the book's beginnings, and include tales set in 1890s Vienna, 1600s Venice, the Spanish Inquisition in 1492, and 1300s Spain.  The sections about the Hanna span the globe -- she travels to Boston, London, Sarajevo, Vienna, and finally Australia.    

I've been to hardly any of these places, so I can't testify to the authenticity of the book, but Brooks made them all feel so real; with her background as an international journalist, she does a great job evoking the moods of all these places. I also liked the fact that the protagonist was an Australian.  As a reader, it's nice to get an international perspective once in awhile -- so many of the books I read are American or British literature.  Some of the historical fiction portions of the book were so interesting, and so realistically created, I wanted to learn more of their stories -- I'd give examples but that might spoil it if you're interested in reading the book, so I'll stop there. 

I actually thought Hanna's story was the least interesting part of the book -- she has a terrible relationship with her mother who is so awful I thought she was unrealistic. And there's another development that is supposed to involve a new mystery, a little like The DaVinci Code, which I thought was really unnecessary. I suppose Brooks felt she needed someone to tie all the parts together and bring it into the present day, but I relaly preferred historical sections.  It reminded me of another historical fiction by Susan Vreeland, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, which is also told in reverse chronological order about the various owners of a fictional painting and is pretty good.

I also feel compelled to post a warning: this book includes scenes with sex, violence, and really nasty anti-Semitism. However, I didn't find it gratuitous, just part of the nature of the book -- it's about Jews during some really awful periods of history; honestly, if you're going to write about the Spanish Inquisition, it's going to get nasty. But I could understand how it could make some readers feel uncomfortable or want to skim those parts. It's still definitely worth reading.


I really liked this book, and if Gwendolyn Brooks writes any more, I would absolutely read them.  I've read two of Brooks' other fiction works: March,winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Year of Wonders; and an excellent non-fiction work about Islamic women called Nine Parts of Desire. I learned a lot about Islam and the Middle East from reading it, and I highly recommend it.