A few years back, I watched the film Picnic at Hanging Rock, but it wasn’t until recently that I discovered that the movie was based on a book of the same name by Australian writer Joan Lindsay. I was going to wait until Carl’s next RIP Challenge to read it, but I’ve already got a growing list for that. So I figured it would be a good summer read as well, seeing as how some of our Georgia temperatures have lately been rivalling the shimmering heat of the Australian Outback – at least in my mind.

I don’t know what it is about Australian films, but I’m drawn to them, especially the odd ones, which they all seem to be. One of my favorite movies is Muriel’s Wedding, and I continually suggest Heavenly Creatures to people I think would be receptive to its macabre subject matter. I’ve done the same with this movie as well.

Anyway, it’s been quite some time since I’ve seen the film, enough so that while I knew the basics, all but the major plot points (and even some of those) had been lost to me. The basics (and I’m not really giving anything away here, since even the movie poster, depicted below, and the book’s description, tell you this), is that on Valentine’s Day in the year 1900, a group of Australian schoolgirls went on a daytrip to a nearby outlook called Hanging Rock. Some of the girls (and a teacher) mysteriously disappeared and were never found.

While the film evokes an eerie atmosphere (helped along by the soundtrack and the soft-focus styling) and implies a more mysterious and perhaps even paranormal cause for their disappearance, the book focuses more on the cast of characters and the events that transpired after that fateful day. The storytelling in the book seems very old-fashioned, and I mean that as a compliment. It was written in the 1960s, but has the tone of a time much closer to its setting, and has various subplots and secondary characters that give it the feel of a spider’s web, with the mystery at its center. This one will keep you guessing – and if you absolutely can’t stand not knowing, the author wrote an epilogue (published as a separate story some years after the book’s initial publication) which purportedly gives a definitive conclusion to the mystery. But then why would you want to go and spoil it?

Even with the literal and figurative heat, this book gave me chills.

Jeremy Mercer’s memoir cum literary travelogue, Time Was Soft There, was one of those serendipitous discoveries that happen from time to time when browsing Amazon. Most of the book suggestions it comes up with for me are either ones I’ve already heard of or have no interest in, but this book popped up one day and of course, I was immediately drawn in by the cover. Who wouldn’t be?

Subtitled A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare and Co., Mercer details a period of time he spent actually living at the famous literary landmark. There were at least two things I learned from reading this book. The first is that the bookstore we know as Shakespeare and Company today is not the same one begun by Sylvia Beach. The second thing is that people actually are able to live in the store, in a kind of literary bohemian commune.

Mercer is a Canadian journalist who’s made some less than stellar life decisions, and finds himself in Paris in an attempt to hide out from the bleak realities of his existence. Wandering around Paris one afternoon, near broke and in low spirits, he happens upon the bookstore and before he knows what’s happening, is invited to an afternoon tea that rivals the tea party scene in Alice in Wonderland for strangeness. And the next thing you know, he’s actually living at the shop, bunking in one of the many beds available to down-and-out creative types, based on the whims of the shop’s owner, George Whitman. What follows in a tale that is stranger than fiction and just as compelling. Reading Mercer’s story almost makes me wish I could share in that experience – if it weren’t for the filthy living conditions (and the fact that I’m not an artist of any sort). The European edition is titled Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs, which is arguably a more fitting and descriptive title for Mercer’s time at the bookstore. One thing is for certain. When I do finally visit the City of Lights, Shakespeare and Company will be one of my stops.

I had read so much positive prepub press (ahh, alliteration!) regarding Aimee Bender’s novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, that I kept sneaking back into Tech Services at work, to see if our copy had arrived yet. And then one morning when I came in to work, it was sitting on my desk, waiting for me. Of course, the cover, with its bright colors, was almost as enticing as a real piece of cake (although I’d never heard of putting chocolate icing on lemon cake before) and I couldn’t wait to dig in. (On a side note, am I the only one who didn’t even notice that the shadow cast by the cake is actually a person’s silhouette? I didn’t even catch that until I was looking at it after I finished the book. Shows how observant I am, I guess!)

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this book. I read it over the course of a couple days but while the idea of it appealed to me, and the writing itself was lovely, the story and characters weren’t. Oh, and what is it with the lack of quotation marks for dialogue? What purpose does it serve? Am I the only one who finds this unnecessary and annoying? Regardless of that little show of affectation, I never really felt connected to any of the characters and towards the end, the story just sort of fizzled out. I know enough not to expect a resolution at the end of every book I read, but this one just felt so anticlimactic. I had such high (and perhaps, misleading) hopes for this book that perhaps I’d set the bar for my entertainment too high. Or maybe it’s just that the magic realism elements felt a bit off for me (at one point, I had to go back and reread a passage several times to make sure I’d read it correctly and understood what was happening – but even after reaffirming that yes, I had read it right, I’m still not sure I fully understand why). Forgive the overwrought food metaphor, but for me this was a literary soufflé that collapsed under its own weight.