Peachy Reads

If walls could talk… Ashenden is the story of a palladian mansion in the Berkshire countryside. It’s fictional, but based on a real house called Basildon Park (picture below). The book opens with the original building of the house and the delivery of the stones by river from a quarry in Bath, and then revisits it every ten years or so thereafter. It offers mere glimpses or snapshots into the lives of the people who reside in the house and its outbuildings, and the fortunes of the house itself—we see it in hard times, abandoned, reclaimed and done up in Victorian splendor, serving as a convalescent home after World War I, and a POW camp in World War II. This book has touches of Downton Abbey, but the reader doesn’t have much opportunity to become attached to many of the characters, since they rarely make it to the next chapter of the house’s history. I really enjoyed this one. It’s a brief history of England of the last three hundred years. from Wikimedia Commons

Nothing is better than embellishing a story with the retelling.  It’s a device that has characterized storytellers from primeval campfires to drunks on bar stools. Sedaris is the master of embellishment— transforming life’s mundane moments into absolute hilarity with his deadpan and usually more than slightly cynical delivery. He gives a bit of insight into his process in this book—journaling everything and highlighting the unusual or slightly madcap moments that make up only a sliver of his life.  Maybe 95% of his life is dull, but it’s the 5% that is repackaged in essay form that has made me a fan.  Is it fiction or nonfiction?  Who can say, but it is probably a little of one, more of the other.  This book has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, but has some parts that don’t quite make the grade.  Still, I think it’s better than his previous book Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk , which I only found mildly entertaining. 

One day Joe, a Native American teenager, helps his father pull saplings that have taken root in the cracks of the foundation of their house. It turns out to be a metaphor for the cracked foundation of their own existence. Mother is late coming home, and their worry sends them out in the car to see if she’s perhaps had a flat tire. They see her driving at a fast clip towards home and further speculate that she’s forgotten that it was Sunday and the grocery was closed. They can never imagine the real reason for her lateness.  Their world is turned topsy-turvy when it transpires that she has been the victim of an unspeakable crime.  Because of the mish-mash of property boundaries that separate tribal land from federal and state land, and the fact that the perpetrator was a white man, bringing the criminal to justice is all the more complicated. Erdrich creates almost a legal thriller with The Round House , but its setting on the reservation makes it all the more interesti...