8-22-14
The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund deWaal
I savored this book, it is that delicious. It caught my eye in the bookcase of the home we were renting in North Carolina, and because the owner's taste in just about everything is spot on with mine, I reasoned that if she had liked it I would, too. I loved it. You could say that it is the biography of the author's family, going back four generations to when his ancestor Charles Joachim Ephrassi left Odessa, Russia to go to Vienna to further his grain exporting business. It follows his descendants, fabulously wealthy Jews, through the generations. Special attention is paid to the second Charles, who collected the netsuke that are the central metaphor of the story, and who was the patron and collector of all the early Impressionists, a friend of Marcel Proust, and in many ways the model for Swann. We follow various family members through the Second World War, in which their palais on the Ring in Vienna was seized and their valuables stripped from them, and into a new diaspora. The author's Uncle Iggy, an expat in Tokyo, is the one who bequeaths the collection of netsuke to his nephew. One thing -- the author's use of language and his extensive vocabulary caused me to look up quite a number of words, and I am the richer for that. In all I am left enriched by what seems to me to be a testament to family, memory, identity, and beauty.
8-12-14
The Hundred Foot Journey by Richard C. Morais
We saw the trailer for this move a while back, and it looked like fun. Then I read some discouraging reviews, so I decided that maybe the book was better. Besides there isn't a movie theatre within 25 miles of this mountaintop, and we haven't even turned on the TV in a month.
I finished the book, and it was fairly entertaining, but the clash of cultures that appeared to be the central energy of the movie trailer was really only a minor bit of the plot line, and it seemed overdrawn and a caricature, especially the role of Mallory, the French chef played by Helen Mirrin in the film. It felt to me as if the story never found its center. The plot line is clear as a young immigrant from India is recognized for his extraordinary gastronomic sensitivity and potential and eventually establishes himself as a culinary superstar, the first foreign born chef to win three Michelin stars in France. But the characters lack nuance. We are told that Mallory is pissed that she is getting old, but we are not shown her heart. I'm left with the sense that the author knew his plot but not his characters. It wasn't bad, and I don't feel it was a total waste of time and money, but I'm glad to be onto something more substantial, something with more life. I probably will skip the movie, but if you want to see a fabulous movie with plenty of food porn, go see Chef. It has heart that this story totally lacks.
8-7-14
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for the Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown
Does listening count? Before we left on our road trip JB downloaded this book from Audible.com. We listened all the way from Austin to Nashville. We listened all the way from Nashville to Highlands. The drive from our house to Highlands is about 25 minutes, so we listened as we drove back and forth. We listened in the driveway. It was a deliciously long book.
The author chose one member of the University of Washington rowing team, Joe Nantz, and uses him as the focal point for telling this remarkable story. It is a portrait as well as an adventure, and not least of all a portrait of a time and a sport that was the passion of the nation at the time. By the time the Olympics comes along, we have so much invested in this rowing team that it would have been heartbreaking had they lost. I don't know how this never got on my radar until now, but I'm so glad we had it to listen to on this trip. We have The Monuments Men for the way home.
8-6-14
Jewel by Bret Lott
I have learned to discipline my ADD self by making deals and contracts with myself. When I need to accomplish a cleaning or organizing task I set a timer. It is amazing how I can tackle something with focus when I know that I am permitted to quit when the timer dings. Now that I have time to read with what appears to be something like abandon, it occurs to me that this is a pretty expensive habit. And I'm reminded (by myself, no external nagging needed) that it might need some moderation. So for now my rule is that for every book I download from Amazon, I will read one paper and ink book I already possess, which I have not read. I guess it would be perfectly OK to read one I have already read. Actually I've already had my eyes on A Prayer for Owen Meany, which I read at a church retreat center in probably 1989 and woke up my roommates on both sides with my laughing. I've read Jayber Crow a number of times, but probably not the last. To Kill a Mockingbird is one I could read annually. And I'm shedding books by sharing them. But the gist of this is that there are plenty of good books already in my possession, and I need to read them, too.
So when I packed for this vacation I brought Jewel, a book I bought at the first writers' conference I ever went to at Bennington College in Vermont in 1992. I don't know when I've ever been so terrified. When I drove onto the campus, I very nearly turned around and fled. I had the beginning of a novel with me, and even though it was safe within my suitcase, I felt more naked and vulnerable than I had ever felt before. The workshop turned out to be wonderful. More affirming than I could have imagined. Of course -- I guess you have noticed this -- the novel was never published, though along the way I did get quite a bit of encouragement. Who knew that all the critiques and editing and drafting and composing and workshopping would end up to be what I'd need to crank out a sermon a week for year after year. Anyway, Bret Lott was one of the teachers, and I've had this book on my shelf for 22 years. Yikes. Time to read it for sure.
It is a timeless story. Bittersweet and human and deep and frustrating and blessing. It begins during the years of World War II, when Jewel and Leston Hilburn, who live a modest life in rural Missisippi, discover that their sixth child is on the way, their eldest already having left home. At first they do not realize that Brenda Kay is handicapped, but in time they understand that she has Down Syndrome, or as the doctor tells them, she is a Mongoloid Idiot. This is not a time of political correctness. Jewel's faithfulness to this child causes all sorts of conflicts in the family.
They move to California, experience financial security, but return to Mississippi. This is a story of passion and conviction. It is colorful and tender, and even though I ought to have read it the day I bought it, I'm glad I had it to read for the first time this week.
8-3-14
I Hate to Leave this Beautiful Place by Howard Norman
I'd enjoyed Norman's previous novels The Bird Artist and The Northern Lights, and had this memoir on my wish list, so I knew it would be a real change of gears from Lucky Us. I'm still floating on the energy of that book and will be for a while. I didn't know what to expect, other than the fact that his deep fascination with nature and especially ornithology was a real draw for me. And that he is a very good writer.
It was much more than I expected. Yes, it was a well-written account of the author's life. I continued to be fascinated by his attachment to birds, his life in Vermont, and his experiences among the Inuit. What took me by surprise was the account of the murder/suicide of the poet who was housesitting for them in Washington, DC and her two year old son and its impact upon him and his family. It is a complicated story, one I am glad I read.
8-1-14
Lucky Us by Amy Bloom
It's about 65 degrees on a screen porch in the mountains of North Carolina. I have tears in my eyes, good ones, for the beauty of this book. And because I have finished it, and wish I had it still to read. And gratitude.
It is more full of life than just about anything else I have read. Full of love and abandonment and devotion and tragedy and gumption and irony and redemption. The central character and primary, but not only, voice, is Eva, a child when her mother leaves her stranded on the porch of her father's house. A first sentence whose promise is happily fulfilled in the entire sweep of the story: My father's wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place to see what might be in it for us.
Set in the 1940's, it is a vibrant collection of snapshots including a Hollywood orgy, a Jewish dp camp in Poland, a hairdressers' shop where Eva makes a living as a fortune teller, and the mansion of new-moneyed italian grocers. There is enough heart in this book to sustain a person for a long, long time. It's one of those books that leave one in a quandary as to what to read next.
I highly recommend listening to Bloom's interview on NPR this week with Diane Rehm.
7-29-14
In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
When I went to my first writers' conference, eons ago, Julia Alvarez was there as she had just published In the Time of the Butterflies. When Amazon came up with their answer to Oyster, Kindle Unlimited for 9.95 a month, this was one of the few books that appealed to me on their list. Alas, until Hachette and the other big boys decide to play, which they may not, I don't think this would be worth the money. Anyway, I took advantage of the free book and found it compelling.
The setting is the Dominican Republic in 1960 under the brutal dictatorship of Trujillo. There are four Mirabel sisters, and they and their husbands are central to the revolutionary movement. Known as Las Mariposas, they are the voices of this story, each quite distinct, all compelling. Based on the true story of the struggle of these people to be free, this book is totally worth reading, though it is ultimately heartbreaking.
7-21-14
I guess you can tell I am a fan of this brilliant young Nigerian author. The narrator of this story is the 15-year-old daughter of a pious and wealthy Catholic Nigerian businessman who holds rigidly high standards for his family and himself. It is very much a coming of age novel in which she and her brother go to visit their aunt and cousins and gain an entirely different perspective on their lives and on what it is to be faithful. It was slow going for me at first, but I grew to care for these characters and to appreciate how tenderly the author was leading us to what we needed to know.
7-19-14
I was a big fan of Seabiscuit, so it's hard to explain why I resisted reading this book for so long, especially given the rave reviews I heard from people I knew and respected and people I didn't know and respected. I was at Costco last week and always browse at the books. I whipped out my iPhone and snapped the covers of books I might want to read and took the plunge.
A couple of nights later I realized that I was extending my bedtime because I was reading about a Pacific air battle. Not. My. Genre. But, still, there I was. I have to say it was brutal reading, and the fact that Hillenbrand doesn't lose the reader in the pain and agony of it all is a testament to her skill. She is so passionate about her subject, Louie Zamporini, that I found it impossible to desert him whether he was adrift on the raft for 47 days or being tortured unmercifully in the Japanese POW camp. The book is indeed redeeming in so many ways.
7-9-14
Another five-star book, and a nice long one! Wecker is a young Jewish woman married to an Arab Muslim, and in this book she pays homage to both of their religious backgrounds with a story that is generous, inventive, and attentive to the immigrant experiences of their forebears. A Golum is a sort of Jewish Frankenstein, created not by mad scientist but rather by rabbis who deal in the occult. This being of clay is given life, but then it usually runs amok and must be destroyed by magical incantations. This particular golum is created to be the wife of a man so horrible he can't get any woman to marry him. He brings her to life on the ship going to his new life in America, but then he promptly dies, so she must find a way to make a life for herself in New York.
The jinni is what we would recognize as the genie in the lamp, and he finds himself in New York when the lamp in question is rubbed just the right way by an antiques dealer trying to restore it to its best condition. He finds his way to Little Syria and inevitably the two characters meet, drawn together as they recognize each other as non-human. She is clay; he is fire. They are not human, but oh, so human. Both are endearing and infuriating in their relationships with the human immigrants among whom they live and with each other. What can I say except that I hope Wecker can write her next book in fewer than the seven years it took to produce this one. It is totally charming and wise.
6-25-14
I was checking out Oyster this week. It's essentially an online library with a monthly fee of $9.95, which gives one unlimited access to 500,000 books. You get a free trial period of one week, so I chose Brooklyn simply because I had heard good things about the author. It is the story of a young woman, Eilis Lacey, who leaves Ireland in the early 1950's to come to America to get a job. It is a gentle, rather mundane story, in a very good way. She is lonely and disappointed about many things, but as she acclimates things get better, and ultimately she meets a young Italian man who seems too good to be true. She returns to Ireland for a family crisis and winds up staying longer than initially planned. The ending is an echo of The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, who was the subject of Toibin's previous novel, The Master, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize.
I'm probably not going to join Oyster because I can't figure out how to search for books. It would be a good deal, though, because I guarantee you I spend more than $9.95 a month on Amazon. My other resolution these days is that for every Amazon book I download I will read one ink and paper book that is sitting on my shelves but I have never read. There are a few of those I'm afraid.
6-19-14
Euphoria is based on some diaries of Margaret Mead and takes place when the main character, Nell Stone and her husband are working among native tribes in Papua, New Guinea. The narrator is Andrew Bankson, another anthropologist, who falls in love with Nell. It is a complex and deep story, fascinating in its details of their work and the peoples they study. I had never heard of Lily King, but am looking forward to reading her other books. This is one of the very best books I've read in a long time.
I have loved McCracken's earlier books, so was delighted to dive into her new volume of short stories. She has such a quirky imagination and writes so genuinely and compassionately about the hearts of her characters. Each story is a whole world. And that doesn't even begin to take in that her writing is pure poetry. The final story, "Thunderstruck," is about a family with a rebellious teenage daughter who deal with her defiance by spiriting the whole family away for a summer in Paris.
6-4-14
It's hard to believe -- and embarrassing -- to realize that it has been close to two years since I have last posted here. So much has gone on and many, many books have been read. I am ten days into retirement, so I anticipate that I will have more time for reading, not that I didn't make plenty of time while I was still working. In the next few weeks I'll try to catch up on some of the best.
Americanah by Chimamanda Adichi
I was introduced to Adichi via her TED talk, The Danger of a Single Story. (http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story) And then I heard that this book had won the National Book Critics Circle Award, a huge deal. I waded into the first pages, wondering how I would identify with a young woman from Nigeria, and I got very little done until I was finished.
The narrator, Ifemelu, is a brilliant young woman from Nigeria who has come to the United States as a college student and encounters racism for the first time. Eventually she authors a witty, critical, and compassionate blog about being a black person in the US who does not share the African American experience. Her take on American racism was new to me and has given me much to think about. An Americanah is a Nigerian who has spent time in the United States and returns to Nigeria transformed. Adichi is as critical of Nigeria as she is of the United States and Great Britain.
But where some authors with a 'cause' employ their novels for its promotion, Adichi embeds this wisdom in a story that completely engaged me. I cared deeply about Ifemelu and longed for her reunion with her high school boyfriend, who never made it to the US. That she writes with grace transcends any cultural divide that might have made this novel difficult for me.
9-3-12 Wild by Cheryl Strayed
An amazing memoir of a young woman whose life had taken every imaginable wrong turn and who reclaimed herself by taking the 1100 solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. She doesn't tidy anything up but allows us to vicariously experience her physical and psychological pain and survival until she emerges as a whole new person. Strayed is the name she created for herself when her marriage ended, but the fellow hikers on the PCT gave her a new name, Queen of the PCT. It is a story of humility, resilience, and ultimately hope. 8-26-12 Girl, Gone by Gillian Flynn
8-6-12 In the Sanctuary of Outcasts by Neil White
White had everything. A life of privilege. Children he adored. A loving wife, homes, prestige, a publishing empire, but it was all held together by deceit and arrogance, and at 32 he was convicted of check kiting and sent to a low-security prison at Carville, Louisiana, which had been and was still a hospital for people with leprosy. His memoir is self-deprecating and generous and well-written. I enjoyed it very much and highly recommend it.
7-4-12 The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
![Virgin Suicides [Paperback]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61LxYIaDhGL._SL500_AA300_.jpg)
Not long ago I listened to an interview with this author on NPR. I read and appreciated his Middlesex several years ago and look forward to reading his newest novel, The Marriage Plot, but have learned from experience that it is frequently disappointing to read an author's earlier work after reading his most recent. Every good author (and not every author is good even though they may have publishing success) learns from the process of writing, and so it is natural to experience an earlier work as more rudimentary in light of what evolves from it.
This book certainly did not suffer from having read Middlesex. It is fresh and haunting. Told in the first person plural, the 'we' of a group of middle aged men recalling their teenage years in suburban Detroit in the 1970's, from the very beginning it has the feel of a contemporary Greek tragedy. That these girls are suicides is evident from the very first. The question is to come to know them as distinct individuals (in contrast to the blended identity of the narrators) and to find meaning in their lives and deaths.
In the New York Times review Michiko Kakutani writes: "With its incantatory prose, its fascination with teen-age tragedy and its preoccupation with memory and desire and loss, 'The Virgin Suicides' will instantly remind readers of Alice McDermott's fine 1987 novel, "That Night." Not only are the themes of the two books similar, but so also are their structures and narrative methods. Both novels focus on events that fracture the consciousness of an entire community into a before and after" (McDermott, by the way, was one of my teachers at the Sewanee Writers' Conference a couple of years and remains one of my favorite authors.)
I'm moving on to a re-read of Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry for our church reading group on July 9 at 7:00 pm. It is a parable of the Kingdom of God, set in Port William, Kentucky, where the narrator/title character has been the town barber for many years. Everyone is welcome to join us.
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
It won't be all that often that it will be over a month between books, but this book is almost 500 pages of prose so stunning that it needs to be savored. It is the second of what is imagined to be a trilogy -- the first was Wolf Hall, which won the prestigious Booker Prize -- and again gives us a view of the life of Henry VIII's court through the viewpoint of Thomas Cromwell.
It may well not be historically acurate, but we have relatively few records of what really went on in the unraveling of the relationship between Henry and Ann Boleyn, and precious little of the trial that condemned her to beheading by a French swordsman. Mantel offers us rich characterization and subtlety in motivation. It is a worthwhile immersion into a fascinating time with fascinating people, and I'm happy to accept it as fiction, which conveys deep and profound truths about human nature if not CNN-type accuracy about what happened and who was responsible.
5-14-12
Behind the Beautiful Tomorrows: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo.
I made it. This is billed as narrative non-fiction, and I'm on the fence. I'm glad I read it, as it is a picture of a particular culture, the slum of Annawadi just outside the gates of the Mumbai airport, where one can feel the sensory overload, the anxiety of subsistence living, and the contrast to the opulence of the hotels. Boo is a meticulous researcher, and I may have found her portrait of her adventure in gathering this information as compelling as the book itself. She is not a fiction writer, and I think this could have soared as fiction in the right hands. The great tension is in the compassion-exhaustion of the characters, whose hardships largely inure them to the tragedy of those who are beyond their immediate circle of intimacy and maybe to some degree those as well. This story is not without hope, though, as there is a certain upward mobility even among the garbage sorters. Interesting, but I'm ready for Hilary Mantel's new book about Henry VIII's court. Don't expect to hear from me for a while here, though. But I'll undoubtedly be cooking. The kitchen is going to be torn out soon, so I'll play in it as long as I can.
5-10-12
Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
The truth is that I read this book a long time ago and even reread it a pretty long time ago and I may well read it again soon. It is that good. But Artie and I were talking about it over lunch, and I'm having rather a long slog through Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo, so thought this was as good a time as any to trot out an all-time favorite. Definitely on my top five.
There is a sub-genre of fiction in which the narrator is a very old and wise person who astutely gives the wide-angle view of his/her life with all its colorful characters, the twists of fate, the might-have-beens, the regrets, the acceptance. Jayber Crow has lived his life as the barber of the river town of Port William, Kentucky. His lifelong love for Mattie Chatham is unrequited. He writes: This is a book about Heaven, but I must say too that it
has been a close call. For I have wondered sometimes if it would not
finally turn out to be a book about Hell-where we fail to love one
another, where we hate and destroy one another for reasons abundantly
provided or for righteousness' sake or for pleasure, where we destroy
the things we need the most, where we see no hope and have no
faith...where we must lose everything to know what we have had.
We will be discussing this book at St. Alban's on Monday, July 9 at 7:00 pm. Please join us. Directions at www.stalbansaustin.org.
4-28-12We will be discussing this book at St. Alban's on Monday, July 9 at 7:00 pm. Please join us. Directions at www.stalbansaustin.org.
The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz
Confession: I have not finished this book. My Kindle tells me I am 51% there, but I've got to move along.
I feel like I've sentenced myself to eat nothing but creme brulee for a solid week. I'm craving kale and brussels sprouts and brown rice and roast chicken. Metaphorically, but I'll bet you had figured that out.
I'll probably dip in and out of David's Sweet Life, and there are a couple of recipes (It's full of recipes that seem to bear little logical connection to the chapters they accompany) I'm going to try. But for me this is not reading. Not reading reading.
I'll let you know...
4-22-12
The Enchantments by Kathryn Harrison
This is the kind of book that I parse out to myself. So delicious that while I want to call in sick and read it in one fell swoop, I discipline myself to give it time. It haunts me.
Set in the household of the last tsar of Russia and founded in historical reality -- yes, Rasputin did have a daughter who was a lion tamer in an American circus -- it takes place largely in the time between the arrest of the royal family and their execution. Masha Rasputina is taken in by the tsarina following the assassination of her father. (The scene in which she and her father's mistress prepare his body for burial is stunning.) The tsarina falsely believes Masha had inherited her father's healing powers, but what she really possesses is the gift of storytelling, and she spends untold hours entertaining the crown prince as he recovers from his latest excruciating attack of hemophilia. These are incredibly beautifully drawn characters, and we are drawn into both of their hearts.
It's the kind of book that I'm sorry when it is over and hoping that Harrison is feverishly working on something new. She is a most gifted writer. And it's the kind of book that makes me need to follow it with something utterly different so as not to suffer by comparison. That's why I'm moving on to David Lebovitz' Living the Sweet Life in Paris.
4-11-12 Three Weeks in December by Audrey Schulman
Two stories alternate, resonate, and ultimately resolve in each other in this account, which takes place in east Africa in 1899 and 2000. Jeremy is an engineer in British East Africa (later Kenya and Uganda) responsible for the building of a critical railway bridge during a time when the residents of the area are being terrorized by two lions with an insatiable taste for human flesh. Max is a mixed race female botanist with Asperger's syndrome who has been sent to Rwanda to locate a vine with powerful beta blocker properties as evidenced by the extraordinarily low rate of heart disease among the mountain gorillas who ingest it. There is much to care about in these stories, much to be fascinated by, much to learn, much to ponder, but above all, much to enjoy.
4-7-12 The Hummingbird's Daughter and Queen of America by Luis Alberto Urrea
It doesn't get much better than this. All of a sudden I
saw that there was a sequel to one of my all time favorite books, which
was The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea. (This is a
two-fer.) It is a novel about the great-aunt of the author who was the
illegitimate daughter of a wealthy landowner an a Yacqui woman who was
known only as Cayatena or the Hummingbird. Teresa, the child, grows up
to be a healer, a mystic, and a revolutionary and by the end of the
great big fat book (and I love good books that go on almost forever) she
has been labeled by the government as the most dangerous woman in
Mexico and she and her father are put on a train to the United States.
Loved it, loved it, loved it.
And now there is Queen of
America, which picks up on that train and takes Santa Teresa and Tomas
into the US, which is wild and wooly, and their adventures only get
wilder and woolier. It is delightful, much more adventure and
plot-oriented than what I usually read. I had sort of the same feeling
of enjoyment that I did when I read Lonesome Dove all those long years
ago, and I read it in hardback. I was along for the ride and just took
in all the landscape and characters and adventures. And it went on for a
long, long time, which is a good, good thing.
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