Author: 459856pwpadmin

 

Last night I finished reading Zora O'Neill's All Strangers are Kin.  Admittedly I purchased the book because the cover caught my eye, and the title sealed the deal.  Of course, I already believe we are all related, and science seems to have confirmed the idea.  If we would treat all strangers as if they were beloved and long-lost kin, the world may become a better place, and also if we would sometimes treat our kin, to whom we occasionally do a disservice because we think we know them too well, with the courtesy which we should accord to strangers, the world would also be a good place. 

 

But this is not what the book is about. The book is really about the linquistics of Arabic, about its history and cultural relevance and the way language and culture interact in ways that define and shape each other, and how this is not really clear in the formal study of a language as opposed to the more organic path to learning a language through spoken relationship.  I'll happily admit that I enjoyed the author's exploration of the language itself, and did not find the sections of the book about language at all tedious.  But then I still possess a kernel of that girl who wanted who applied for gradutate study in linquistics.  That I didn't go is a good thing as I recognize that I am not really linquist nor scholar material, but O'Neill's joy in the language and its use is familiar, and I found the book fascinating even as I recognize that it would not appeal to everyone.

Of course, although the book is clearly about language, it explores far more than mere words.  Zora O'Neill travelled to four countries to travel and study and explore spoken Arabic, not the formal scholarly Arabic she learned in grad school, and the book is filled with her story.  It is about Zora herself, and her own journey, as much as it is about the language and the people she meets.  It is a book filled with stories, filled with humanity, filled with insight.  It is a book about listening, and about living and about the complex way language shapes our interactions and our connections and about the way our daily interactions shape our lives, and the people we become.  Zora O'Neill uses language to show us a sense of daily life in parts of the Arab world, a world most of us know nothing about.  Through language and communication she paints a portrait of people, people very much like ourselves, people who love, and dance, joke and sing, and sometimes struggle to get by.  In the beginning of the book she reminds us that the portrait we see of the middle east, through headlines and the nightly news is not normal, that "the news is, by definition, the abnormal". And she reminds of this again near the end of the book, when she is in Morocco and is asked how it feels to be an American in the Muslim world during these terrible times. But she is not aware of the terrible things going on in the news, she is simply eating, drinking, talking and studying. She is simply living, and she takes us along on her journey.  Although that journey has some fits and starts, and occasionally rambles, O'Neill is a gifted storyteller with a self-deprecating sense of humor, who in the end shows us that language, like our lives, has its inconsistencies, and humor, and that yes,  all strangers are kin.

 

 

 

Earlier in the year I had toyed with the idea of posting a reading list in stages, one list for each half of the year.  But then June had come and gone before I knew it, and my reading the first half of this year had been rather inconsistent.  There are several books that I have started and not finished, not because I don't want to finish them, but because I got distracted. 

 

Then Frances posted her list and inspired me to own up to my own scattershot reading attempts for the first half of the year. If I wrote about a book on the blog, I'll link to that post. Considering that book posts fell off, I may offer a few comments on a few other books,

 

1.    Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick

2.     J. Stevenson, Creeds, Councils, and Controversies. I picked this up as secondary reading relating to my EFM class.  It is basically a series of original source documents from the fourth through fifth centuries illustrating the development of Christian doctrine.  I actually found it fascinating.  We forget how controversial ideas that many people take for granted today were when they were new, as well as how society shapes religion as much as religion shapes society.

3.    Garrett Jones, Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More than Your Own.

4.     Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited. Required Reading for EFM, but I found it to be quite powerful and I read it twice because it has such a huge influence on my thinking.  Highly recommended in this time of anger, hatred, and discrimination.

5.     Aja Raden, Stoned: Jewelry, Obsession and how Desire Shapes the World.

6.    Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies.

7.     Magda Kapa, All the Words.

8.     Joanne Harris, Gentlemen and Players.

9.    Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death.  A seminal book for me.  I've read it several times and I learn something new with each reading.

10.    Stephanie Spellers, The Episcopal Way.

11.     Leonard Sax, The Collapse of Parenting.  Part of a recommended reading list for a project I have been working on.  This book and the others, (later on this list and still to be read) have sometimes proved enlightening, and at other times frustrating.

12.    Patrick Rofkus, The Name of the Wind.

13.     Schlomo Sand, How I Stopped Being a Jew. Thought provoking and although it seems odd to say so, it played into some of the changes in my thoughts following reading Thurman's book.  Of course I never was a Jew.

14.      Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter.  Reread in this crazy election year.  No less thought provoking than when I read it initially.

15.     W. Stanley Moss, Ill Met by Moonlight.

16.     Genevieve Antoine Dariaux, Elegance. Reread.  Just because.

 17.     Julian Fellowes, Snobs. Loaned to me by a fellow Downton Abbey fan.  I found it disappointing.

18,.     Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923 – 1968 The Idealist.

19.     James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me.  I bought this quite a while ago in one of those Amazon sales where it was only a couple of bucks, but never read it.  I read it after my grandson shared a whopper of a lie his teachers told him at a dinner party. I said nothing at the time because I didn't want to embarrass him in front of a bunch of adults.  I intended to review the book but never got around to it even though there was very little in the book I didn't already know.  This may be the penalty of being the daughter of a historian, a historian who thought his children should know the truth, or as much truth as we know, about history.  I grew up learning that the things my teacher's told me were wrong; I remember most of those things because my dad was a fabulous story-teller, better than most of my teachers. We didn't discuss Vietnam, but I've read extensively about Vietnam in adulthood, so once again, nothing surprising.  Still, it was interesting, and worth reading if only to remind ourselves that what we know and believe is often shaped by what we want to know and believe, and that what happened is only part of the story.  What might have happened may be equally relevant.

20,     Stephen King, The Dark Half.

21.    Susan Forward, Toxic Parents. See No, 11 above. 

22.    Michael Connelly, The Gods of Guilt.

 

There you have it.  In reviewing the list I can see why I feel frustrated with my reading so far this year, simply because although there are books I loved and books I found useful, there was a dearth of fiction.  It is the fiction that feeds my soul, and there was only one or perhaps two soul-feeding books in there.  Note to self, indulge in a good story whenever possible.

 

 

It has been a while since I've done any kind of book post.  I have not stopped reading.  In all fairness however, I also have not yet read all the books that I posted as sitting on my desk, next in line.  Some of those books are still waiting patiently while I have been distracted by other words, other stories.  Recently there has been a fair amount of light reading, yes, some of it verging toward the escapist end of things.

 

I did read I am Spock by Leonard Nimoy, which had been given to me as a Christmas gift. It is not a book I would have chosen for myself, although I have long admired Nimoy as an actor and a director.  It proved to be quite an interesting read, filled with intelligent and thoughtful analysis of the role of the actor and director, discussing both aspects of building a character and the consistency of message in a dramatic work, as well as the role of drama in contemporary culture.  Of course there was plenty of the "I did this then" stuff that autobiography is all about, and about which I do not always have patience.  I also acknowledge that this is basically inconsistent seeing as I write an "I did this then" kind of blog.  Oh well.  Contradictory impulses and inconsistencies are us.

 

Having read the book, I was also interested in reacquainting myself with some of the material, especially some of the non-Spock material.  On my mom's last evening in town we watched the movie Three Men and a Baby, which was directed by Nimoy.  As I read about the making of the film, I remembered the story, remembered the film as well.  I saw both the original French film and the English remake, and remembered thinking that despite its flaws, the American version was better.  Nimoy and his team did a good job with translating the idea of the original film to something that would appeal more widely to American audiences, although there were way to many people, too many story lines, and not enough questions being asked.  Mom didn't remember watching the film when it first came out.  But she thoroughly enjoyed it now, as did I.

 

Admittedly it is very 1980's in terms of its style and cultural references, at times embarrassingly so.  But it was, at least in the first half, hysterically funny.  Neither of us could stop laughing.  I wonder if it would be equally amusing to a younger generation.  Certainly cultural mores and expectations shift with time, and I wonder if it is simply too much a piece of its own time.  I'm not certain,  although I probably won't watch it again. The ending seemed a bit of a letdown now; perhaps I felt the same way at the time, I don't remember my thoughts that well, but I'm not sure how I would end it differently without making an entirely different movie.

 

Shortly after directing Three Men and a Baby, Nimoy directed the film version of Sue Miller's The Good Mother.  I do remember that I read that book when it first came out, and I saw the movie as well.  I also remember thinking the movie was seriously flawed and not nearly as nuanced as the book in terms of characterization and layers of responsibility, caring, and emotional involvement.  That is probably not surprising.  I did enjoy Nimoy's thoughts on the story, and what he was trying to accomplish with the film, whether or not I think he was successful, or even if I agree with his perspective concerning the book.  I did, however, want to read the novel again.  I have not yet watched the movie, nor have I decided if I will or will not watch it. 

 

I requested the book from the library, and I read it this week.  It was worth reading again.  My own perspectives have shifted in 30 years, although of course, the author's perspective and the story itself has not.  But the way words transcend and burrow between the tendrils of our shifting understanding is one of the beauties of a good story.

 

It continues to be a profoundly sad story, and I am not going to write about the specifics of the book, or the ideas that are explored except to say that ideas of what constitutes good parenting are extremely culture-specific, no matter how much we hold our own beliefs as sacred.  And yet, there was a moment, a moment when Anna was meeting with the family services representative,, when she says too much and states that she and Leo had sex while her daughter, Molly, was asleep in the bed, when "her (the family services lady's) face firmed, suddenly looked younger and tougher", a moment when everything changes.  I suspect that Molly might have won based solely on the original charge, but not on this point, not in that time and place. 

 

That moment was pregnant with emotional weight.  It reminded me a recent moment, well, in the last year of George's life, a far less significant moment with far less serious repercussions. It was evening.  George had been put to bed and I was watching TV in one room and his night-time caregiver was in the adjoining room.  I was watching one of the early episodes of the HBO series Girls and there was a moment, and it was probably related to a sexual encounter, where, although she was just listening, the young woman stiffened, and sat more upright, with a small stifled gasp. It was not so much the sex that prompted the response, but something about the attitude and response of the characters in the story.  It was a moment  in which I realized I could not watch that show as long as I had caregivers in my house.  I lived in a different place than I had before, I had women taking care of my husband who had very different views of the world, and that even a simple thing like watching a television show could render our situation untenable. I could have stood on principle, that in my own home I could watch what I wanted, and I think the show had much to say that was worth watching, and yet I could not.  I could watch all the blood and guts and violence in the world, should I wish to do so, but that show alone had a powerful potential to change perceptions, and therefore harm my ability to care for George.

 

But that moment is not the entire book.  I ended up agreeing with some of Nimoy's perceptions and disagreeing with others.  The young Anna shows a certain flatness and lack of emotional depth, not due to a failure of the writer's but simply as a part of her character.  She is very inwardly-drawn and reserved, although for a brief period, during her love-affair, she opens up in different ways.  There is evidence from the beginning however that her relationship with Leo will never work, that this is not who she is, so the subsequent shutting down is not surprising.  Of course the story is also told from Anna's perspective, as a reflection on the past.  There is some small comfort in that, in this story which is a modern tragedy and in which there is no true happy ending.  Although Anna's voice is a quiet voice, there are hints, not insignificant hints, peppered throughout, that she has not completely withdrawn again, that she has in fact begun to find herself through this terrible story, and all is not completely lost.  Could things have been different?  Could Anna have stood on principle and not backed down?  Perhaps.  But that is not the story being told; although it may have been a more satisfying story, I suspect it would have also been less significant.  The reader is left, puzzling over a world that will never be the same, and not, perhaps as it could have been (I refuse to say "should"), in short, life.