Category: Books

I am in the midst of rereading Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds. Which I read when it was first released in paperback.  I figured it would be a good travel book, good for tired lonely nights, or airplanes and airports, and because it is the alternate novel selection for a group. In fact, I was not, at first, certain I wanted to reread the novel remembering nothing more than it was a saga of forbidden love, even though I remembered loving it at the time.  I quickly realized that memory was playing tricks however, that my memories, and my doubts were based more on the mini-series based on the book than on the book itself, and I am finding it a very satisfactory read, a book I am not only happy to be reading again, but which I feel sustains the differences in perception I as reader bring to the novel after a 40 year absence, because there is more to this book than the story of Meggie and Ralph.  In fact although they are the axle around which this story revolves, they become almost the least interesting characters in this drama of family, environment, love, and fate. In am thinking that hidden in this story is a rather complex meditation on the choices we as humans make and the consequences of said choices, both for ourselves and those around us.

I am reminded that the last time I took to the air, last November, I read Stephen King’s new novel Dr. Sleep, which I also thoroughly enjoyed. Dr. Sleep is a sequel to The Shining, which I read long long ago, and although this book picks up some years after the events of the first novel, and carries through on certain themes, it is very much its own book, its own story.  King is a master of a genre that actually has a long history in American Literature, and I would not give him short-shrift.  The story is very well told, but although The Shining is a great, terrifying, introspective horror, this novel is something else altogether.  I do not think it is any less for that.  We all evolve after all, even Danny, the little boy from The Shining.  One of the things I enjoyed about this book is that Danny does evolve, he chooses to confront his demons, although the path that gets him to that choosing is not necessarily of his own making or his own desire.  So it is for all of us. Although Danny seems to come very close to being sucked down by his past and never pulling out of his own internal morass, he manages to become something more than his hurts and terrors, more than his inner fears might allow.  And this is the thing about King;  yes, he writes horror stories, but it would be a mistake to dismiss him as merely a writer of genre fiction.  He writes psychological novels about the stranger that lives deep inside all of us, taking us on romps through the human psyche, guided romps where we know we may be frightened but where we also know we will come out relatively unscathed. There is always something more going on, more than just the terror; although just as in life, one may choose to see  or not to see. 

Which reminds me that I am still behind as concerns reporting about my reading list, so let’s take another stab at rounding out November.  

Dr. Sleep was not the only deeply psychological novel I read that month. I also reread A Christmas Carol, and there are many similarities between the two and their authors.  A Christmas Carol was dashed off because Dickens needed money to pay his bills, and i don’t think Dickens, in his day, was considered any more literary than King is today.  He was a writer of mostly serialized popular fiction, and in many ways he was a cultural icon of his time, much as King is today.  In fact, that he is still so esteemed may have been considered by some to be surprising.  And yet A Christmas Carol is a deeply philosophical and psychological story, and this does not even include all the Christmas trappings.  It is a story of redemption, of gaining wisdom, of what we currently popularly think of as the journey of the second half of life.  And the very contradictions of it, that it was written to make money, yet it sharply criticizes the life spent in pursuit of avarice, the combined darkness and the glowingly define Christmas sparkle, make it into something both simple (Christmas yes!) and complex.  In fact, Christmas, as we think of it today, owes more to Charles Dickens than to any religious sentiment, and I think my youthful self sometimes read the story with visions of movies and musical interpretations dancing in my my head.  Or do I experience Scrooge’s journey more poignantly today because I have made my own track through the forest?

And then there was the Dutch House. The house is as much a character in this family drama as the members of the family themselves. Two children are booted from their family home after their father’s death by a stepmother who is more interested in the house than in human relationships, and the house takes on an outsize role in their yearnings for the happy family they lost. Except that it was never happy, and the house, and what it symbolizes for the various members of the family proves to be a great foundation for this exploration of family dynamics.

Patchett, as usual brings a keen understanding of human complexity to the story. I particularly like that the story is told from the perspective of a boy, who becomes a man, who himself is neither particularly introspective or observant, which makes him a great foil for this deft exploration of interpersonal dynamics. I also like the way the story is written around the house, the way the house itself, although inanimate, stands in the midst of all of them, both through its presence and its absence, a symbol of yearning, loss, love, isolation. This is a novel about the way people make assumptions — about places, people, their lovers, family, coworkers — that are more about the self than about opening a relationship. Everyone in this story knows everyone else, but for the most part they go through life never seeing each other.

Interesting to me, is how all these stories relate, in one way or another, to the novel I am currently reading, and will finish today.  It is of course one of the grand themes of human existence, one deserving of much exploration and always benefitting from new insight and further explorations,

And that seems to get me about two-thirds through November, and I feel I am at a stopping point, which means alas there is more catching up to do, four more books from November, eight from December, and whatever is happening this month.  So be it.  Slowing down, no so much physically or mentally, although that does happen as we age, but more in terms of a reflective slowing seems to be one of the current themes of my life.  I do not at the moment feel the need to rush through things, to accumulate experiences as if I am crossing off items in a list.  Bear with me.

The best intentions…..

I have read three books already in 2020 and yesterday I spent some time catching up with my reading notes.  I had been remiss concerning this task and I realized the omission felt significant.  So too the missing book posts, and although I have decided to forgo catch-up blogging in general, this remains the exception: the one case in which I cannot move forward without first looking backward.  The books I read always end up informing my thoughts, past reading informing future reading, the way our experiences, all our experiences, and all our acquaintances end up informing and shaping the people we are.   The books I read can become either acquaintances of friends, certainly the books I keep become friends, and I think sometimes we humans are simultaneously too narrow and too broad in the way we define friendship.  As to books, I am reminded this morning of this quote from William Churchill:

If you cannot read all your books at any rate handle, or, as it were, fondle them — peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you will at least know where they are.  Let them be your friends;  let them at any rate be your acquaintances.

               William Manchester: The Last Lion: Visions of Glory. page 31.

I hear Churchill’s voice in the quote, a voice that is familiar to all of us with a penchant for history at least, and it was a sweet discovery earlier this week, as my own view toward books is quite similar.  I have begun the task of rereading the first two volumes of The Last Lion in the coming months, mostly as a refresher and prologue to the third volume, which I own but have not yet read.  

But today I must deal with housekeeping.  Beginning with November and working may way through to books read in December, I hope to finish up the 2019 reading list over the course of the next week or two.  Notes or thoughts arising from current reading may, or may not be interleaved, depending on the whims of the muse.

Books that were just ok to good.

I have long loved Lee Child’s Reacher series, and of course I read the newest installment, Blue Moon.  As usual, Child has an ability to capture, in spare but haunting words, the forgotten places, the places we don’t really think about, the places we ignore.  This quote, from the opening lines of Blue Moon sticks with me, for all of its simplicity, reminding me of a lifelong fascination with maps, and with dreamy wonderings and imaginings of life, not just in exotic locales, but the places we both see and do not see.

The city looked like a small map of America. It was just a tiny polite dot, near a red threadlike road that ran across an otherwise empty half inch of paper.  But up close and on the ground it had half a million people. It covered more than a hundred square miles. . .

Alas, that was the most memorable part of this book for me.  As usual the storytelling was excellent but the body count got to me and aspects of the story seemed weak, geared more to provoking thrills or outrage rather than a coherent story. Alas, my own outrage was aimed more at the author than the injustices portrayed. I will read the next one and see if this development is the exception or a trend.

Allison Pittman’s Loving Luther was an engaging, easy-going, and entertaining read that placed no demands upon the reader. Told from the perspective of Katharina von Bora, the first half of the book, which revolved around Katharina’s life in the convent before she met Luther, was more engaging than the second half, which seemed to be trying too hard to turn the story into a conventional romance.  Sometimes, light bits of fluff like this are just the thing, temporary amusements.

Likewise, Stephen King’s Elevation.  I picked this up in an airport bookstall while I was waiting for a short, one-hour flight.  It was the perfect entertainment at the end of a long day, and perfect for the duration of the flight.  It is very well written, which is not at all surprising, and sweet; a different perspective from the kind of dark psychological exploration that we tend to expect from King. This novella is a rather pointed look at the kinds of issues that fill contemporary newscasts, but it is also a story of letting go of the things that weigh one down. In fact this dichotomy encapsulates its power. Although I have been accused too often of being cynical, I perhaps am also too easily satisfied by simple hopeful things. In retrospect the memory of this book has grown on me, and although I think the book may be dismissed as simple pandering to cultural unrest, or even blind hopefulness, it is actually a bit more than that.  It has snuck up on me perhaps.

Last, in today’s discussion, but far from least, Marty Makary’s book, The Price We Pay, is about how the commodification of medicine has broken the health care system.  It is a good book that I think more people should read.  

Makary starts with stories, stories that are at times shocking, and then moves from there to the data behind those stories.  This is where the strength of this book lies, in the naming and the call to action.  Makary admits that he has been, through much of his career, ignorant of these very forces, forces that have created an unwinable game, despite the fact that he works from deep within the system.  And yet it is this very fact, the fact that he is in the middle of the system, that has allowed him to reveal some of the inner workings, inner workings that appall him as much as they will outrage the reader.

The book is well-written and clear, and Makary takes the time not merely to expose the problems but to honor agents of change.   Makary’s suggestions for fixing the problem are not enough, in and of themselves, but i agree with him that the first step toward healing is in the naming.

And it feels as if I have written more than enough for one post, even though I have discussed merely a third of the twelve books I read in November.  This project may take more than a week, but I will get through it.  Until next time….

Still working on the backlog, reading wise, with the hopes of finishing up the September inventory here.   My reading was rather random, with no apparent themes, so I think a simple list will get the job done.

I started the month with Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians and read the entire series of three books over the course of the month, mostly while riding an exercise bike at the gym.  The series was perfect bicycle reading, and a perfect escape.  I thought the first novel was good but I struggled with the second, China Rich Girlfriend.  The book felt rushed to me and the story was not as strong.  I was also annoyed by the tendency to footnote everything, as if the book was trying too hard, taking itself too seriously.  The asides (still annoying) continued in the third volume, Rich People Problems, but I felt the story line was the strongest of the three, and the book was therefore much more enjoyable.

Other Books:

10 Minutes, 38 Seconds In This Strange World. Elif Shafak.  I wrote about this pretty fabulous novel in my post last Friday.  

Why Dad’s Leave: Insights and Resources for When Partners Become Parents.  Meryn G. Calendar.  This seemed to make sense and had some thought-provoking ideas but I found it very repetitive and at times circular. It might or might not be useful to people in the field, and I don’t have the expertise to judge.  Although I don’t mind having read it, much of it seemed like common sense, or like it should be common sense, but perhaps is not.  Or I am completely out of my depth.

Gypsy and Other Poems.  James Baldwin.  Powerful.  Beautiful. Haunting.

Tributary: Poems. Cid Corman.  I’ve had this book a long time and I reread it as I was organizing the library shelves.  When I first bought the book I loved the poems but knew nothing about Beauford Delaney.  Now I live in Knoxville, Delaney’s hometown, and I was struck by the photos of Delaney’s paintings in the front of the book.  Even in my youth I thought the poems themselves captured something essential about art. I still think this, and perhaps find the poems even more expressive of the artistic moment than my younger self knew.

A Better Man.  Louise Penny.  Sigh.  I shut the door and plowed through this, forcing myself to pause only for necessities.  Call me a fan.

Ordinary Light. Tracy K. Smith.  Smith’s memoir of her childhood describes what is essentially a perfectly normal life. That is its strength, and the source of its beauty.  One of Smith’s talents is in capturing the ordinariness of experience and sussing out the light within, showing that it is the very ordinary itself that is truly extraordinary.  

Bottle of Lies. Katherine Eban. An expose of the dark underbelly of the global generic pharmaceuticals industry, as well as a good story of the politics, compromises, and cognitive dissonance that is necessary to run the current US system.  I found it upsetting.  Haven’t yet researched sources. Also mentioned previously, but not in detail.

I was sitting in front of a fire, drinking a glass of wine with a friend and chatting, thinking how nice it would be to curl up with a book in front of the fire….

Alas.  I had other things to do, and was struggling with my current novel. I remembered, however,  that I hadn’t written a book post since September, when I had attempted a marathon catching-up. I am still behind, but rather than delve into another huge post, I am going to start with October, which is easier in a way, because I only finished four books.

There were several reasons for this:  travel, stress, perhaps a touch of depression, but also some good things.  I am increasingly more interested in diving deeper into whatever I am doing, letting time slip away. This means that for now my reading is slowing down, becoming more reflective and conversational even.  Perhaps I am simultaneously reading and rereading. Life is not a contest after all, although for me sometimes my biggest struggle is accepting that, letting go of behaviors that were once adaptive but have become maladaptive, preventing me from being the best person I can be, according to my own understanding of what that entails.

And so on to the books — except that somehow my reading and my understanding is not all that straightforward:

Devil In the White City was the first book I finished, although not the first book I started.  I had read it years ago, was rereading it for a book club, and found myself fascinated by the juxtaposition of the stories.  And it is a book about two stories, stories that happen to take place in the same place at the same time but seem unrelated. Or are they?  I saw a lot here:  the rise of industrialism and the dream of a shiny future; a book about opportunism but also about the not so pretty underside of opportunism; a book about dreams and hopes for but also a book about how our dreams can blind us.  I kept turning back to David Graeber’s book Debt, and to David Brooks’ books The Road to Character and The Second Mountain, which I was reading simultaneously (and savoring slowly, not finishing until this month).  

I am not sure that Erik Larson pulled off that grand sense of connection, but the book still haunts me, haunted me through the reading of Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte, which I also read slowly, beginning in September and continuing throughout October,  savoring every morsel. Reading and rereading. Sometimes I would put it aside confused by a reference that seemed just beyond my ken, until the meaning hit me and I was back.  The book is fun, smart, witty, terrifying and sometime deliciously sarcastic.   But it is also thought-provoking and filled with challenges. Rushdie puts his own spin on modern life, mixing our obsessions with surfaces, our yearnings for depths despite our inability to hold on to them.  In some ways he is exploring the same malaise as  Graeber and Brooks, Larson as well, although less obviously so.

Quichotte also came uncomfortably close to Katherine Eban’s revelations about fraud in the generic drug industry in Bottle of Lies, which I had just finished at the end of September.  He was referencing a different case, one I had forgotten, but I remained unsettled, and perhaps felt the boundaries of my own bubbles pushing in a little more closely than I might prefer.

All of these books explore uncomfortable truths, our ongoing struggles with cognitive dissonance and the kind of moral dishonesty it inculcates, despite our best, and mostly well-meaning intentions.  This is the same kind of moral dishonesty that was also painfully evident in the portrait of the lives of free blacks in the movie Harriet. Necessary, probably yes, at least for free slaves in the south, but what may be adaptive and necessary in one setting can become blindness, self-justification and maladaptive in others.

The other two books played perhaps a smaller role in my thoughts, although I have no regrets for having read them. I did not find Anne Thurston’s book Knowing Her Place: Gender and the Gospels, to be completely successful, although I did find it thought provoking and insightful in places.  The author appeared to want to explore the way we read and understand biblical stories based on our own cultural gender biases blinds us to possibilities and meaning, meaning that can be beyond gender itself, but the book often became mired down in the very gender details the author was attempting to uproot, to the detriment of the very issues she seems to want to explore.  

Kudos is the third in Rachel Cusk’s trilogy that began with Outline, and in some sense the author has come full circle.   In the first book the narrator seemed to be in the process of rediscovering herself, having lost one view of herself, and in this, the final novel, she has reached the goal, only to find that the success itself becomes another loss of self, exploring the way  “successful writer” is itself a role outside of the self.  Throughout the novel Cusk explores both the internal and external person of the writer, as she absorbs the narrative of others, and they project their narrative onto her.   In short, self can never be defined by success, and, as the author rather pointedly reminds us in the final scene, whatever internal or external success we might achieve, it is only the internal that can sustain us as we can never quite escape the roles others assign to us.

It seems I have been remiss in updating you regarding my reading habits.  Odd as it may seem, given my own internal struggles with the idea of posting book lists, this was not intentional.  Also not surprisingly, once I noticed that I had failed to make book posts, I was initially more than willing to just let them remain in the ether.  Then I wanted to write about something I had read, and relate it to something I had read previously, except that a previous post only existed in my imagination.

So I suppose today's post is an attempt to rectify that situation, or at least insure that it does not happen again in the future.  

May

May was packing month.  

Three Reacher novels on the exercise bike, or when my back was sore from packing boxes. 

Holy Envy was read twice, because I needed to read it twice to really get the gist of what Barbara Brown Taylor was saying.  She manages to be accessible and deep and to subtly explore what we can learn from other's faith and traditions without either belittling them or ourselves, or falling prey to a kind of imperialism of belief.

Olive Kitteridge:  I had intended to reread this for a long time, not having liked it much the first time around.  I  still found it interminably sad.  A novel about the way we all hunger for intimacy and connection, but sometimes cannot allow ourselves to experience it.  I am glad to have reread it but will not read it again.

The Sense of an Ending:  This I loved.  That same sense of yearning for intimacy, but deftly explored.  A book that seems straightforward, but isn't.  Life as we assume it to be, as we remember it, how we perceive it, and the vagaries of memory.  You don't really the see the depth until the end, and then you wonder how you missed it all along.  Much like life, that — if one is astute and observant.  Barnes pulls off magic here.

Two lives:  Linda Ronstadt's life in music with great insight into the process of making of music.  Stephanie Land's astute social commentary from a perspective different from a majority of its readers.  Maid pushes buttons, MANY buttons, alas.

June

June was moving month. 

Lee Child, Alafair Burke and George Simenon offered distraction and easy entertainment on the bike and off.

Rosalind Creasy's Edible Landscaping filled my head with dreams and ideas and helped me refine my own desires.

I found The Road to Character both fascinating and simultaneously frustrating due to sense of whinging about the book that bordered on off-putting. I came close to abandoning it.  With time, my feelings have softened because of the ways it has sparked connections between ideas in my head.

Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance is an incredible, moving, and powerful novel.  I loved it even though it is often dark, often distressing.  Also tender.  The majority of the story takes place in India in 1975, during the time of the great emergency, but for all the despair and horror in this book there is also hope and transformation.  I emerged from reading it a different person than the one I had been going in.  I wish I had written about it. It is worth reading again, not in order to write, but because it has more depths to plumb.

July

I don't really know what happened in July; unpacking perhaps and light reading.

Ruth Reichl reminded me of a time and place and a magazine I loved.  Lidia Bastianich reminded me of my own path to becoming a cook and inspired me as I settled into a new kitchen.

The War of Art is about how we sabotage ourselves.  It is repetitive, annoying and, as an audiobook, an effective tool to be wielded when one needs a bit of a push.

I found the horses more interesting than the people in Rosalind Belben's Our Horses in Egypt. 

I am late to discovering Tana French, an author who seems to write murder mysteries that appeal to those who love literary fiction.  The Likeness is enjoyable and thought provoking read that explores the way the choices we make shape the people we become.

August

The month of escapism perhaps.  I was in the house, but not settled.  I may be paying the price now for the things I could have done but did not.  The books were good though.

Six Week Cure…  is a good summary of information in the Eades previous books, with notes, but I decided not to keep it on the shelves.  I like the links to primary sources.  It is not difficult.  I have no idea if the diet works as I haven't attempted it.

Salt, Sugar, Fat is a very good exploration of how corporate interests have altered the way we eat and imagine eating.  Not necessarily a good study of the implications therein, but there are other books for that.

My Sister the Serial Killer captured my attention from the beginning and held it with smartly written spare prose which walks the perfect line, keeping the poignancy and absurdity in check, while simultaneously hiding and revealing. There is a lot of depth here, but it sneaks up on one from behind.

I read Where'd You Go Bernadette simply because I saw a trailer for the movie. It was a thoroughly enjoyable light read and the author uses humor and satire well in describing the absurdities of modern life as well as our lack of tolerance. Actually the aspect of this novel I enjoyed the most may be the way the author portrays the tyranny of those without imagination. I decided the movie would probably bore me and so haven't seen it.

I got through Nine Perfect Strangers on the bike, but wouldn't read it otherwise.  Average.

I couldn't ride the bike reading Where the Crawdads Sing.  The nature writing was too poetically beautiful.  I enjoyed the novel, although it verged into sappy sentimentalism at times.  This suited the story however so I can't consider it a flaw. 

David Graeber's Debt is one of the most intellectually enjoyable and thought-provoking books I have read in a long time.  Graeber encourages the reader to ask questions, to get beyond the blinders of one's own mind-set.  You might not agree with him about everything, nor should you, but he will make you think.

Two books about art:  Rackstraw Down's In Relation to the Whole, and Mary Gabriel's Ninth Street Women, which isn't so much about art as the artists and the cultural changes that shaped an art movement, have continued to crop up in my thoughts and understandings.  Both are important because they have helped me to see in new ways.

Finis.