From One Book Lover

I hang my head in shame and announce something that should be obvious by now: I did not read Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin, the Polar Book Club book this past winter. I tried. In fact, I am still trying to read it, a few sideways glances at a time. It is perhaps the least enjoyable book I have encountered this year. It was weird, which I normally do not mind (and, truth be told, tend to prefer).  It was tedious reading, scattered, unfocused storytelling.  It also put children in adult situations. Okay, let's not be coy: a pre-teen boy was having all the sex he could muster. I cannot tolerate gratuitous sexualization of children in books, and since the story ambled along in a scattershot way, I did not see the value in that portrayal of a child.  Finally, it was not the story I expected to read. I thought I was getting a love story that stretched across time.  Instead, I managed to get quite a ways into the story without a glimmer of such romanc...

Winter is the perfect time to bundle up, grab a cuppa and climb into a good book. Who's with me? Let's form the Polar Book Club! The 2015 Polar Book Club selection is Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin. Here is a description from Helprin's website: Set in New York at the beginning and the end of the twentieth century, Winter´s Tale unfolds with such great narrative force and beauty that a reader can feel that its world is more real than his own. Standing alone on the page before the book begins are the words, I have been to another world, and come back. Listen to me. In that world, both winter and the city of New York (old and new) have the strength and character of protagonists, and the protagonists themselves move as if in a vivid dream. Though immensely complicated, the story is centered upon Peter Lake, a turn-of-the-century Irish burglar, and Beverly Penn, a young heiress whom he encounters in robbing her house, and who eventually will die young and ...