Restingmotion

One year of reading ends and another begins.  I am not going to list all the books I read in 2021 here, but I will include links to the previous monthly installments at the end of this post for those who just can't get enough.  This is the first year in many that I actually posted a reading list every month.  In fact, there may have been months when I believe that is all I posted.

 

I read more books in 2021 than I did in 2020, and in both years I read far more than my yearly average over previous years.  I hadn't really thought about this very much until I sat on the fringes of a conversation regarding reading, where the others involved noted that they had in fact read less than usual since the Covid-19 pandemic began.  I noted, to myself, that I had read substantially more, but didn't jump in because the conversation was actually far more interesting without my input, which would have served no purpose other than bragging rights.  

 

As for my own increased reading there were several factors involved.  To begin with, I had decided to read more in 2020, even before the pandemic shut-down began, and then, like many others, I went through a period of ennui where I was unable to read.  I overcame that however.  To some degree I simply. read more because I went out less; there were fewer social obligations to distract me.  I also have to admit that health issues may have contributed; it would be naive to deny this.  My television viewing also increased exponentially, and that I do blame on health struggles and lack of energy.  My heaviest television use occurred at those times of greatest listlessness.  

 

I also cut back on social media in many ways.  One would think that in a time of greater social isolation, greater social media would enhance one's sense of connectivity.  But that was not what I found.  Yes, zoom was a godsend and I have friends I zoom with, and friends I talk with regularly.  But otherwise it seemed to me that I found social media sites polarizing.  Pandemic shut-downs were hard enough for everyone, but there were times that I felt that the combination of the news and social media, especially combined with a lack of one-on-one human interaction, were more isolating, and made conversations and interactions, if anything, more high-strung and volatile, as if none of us could completely get out of our heads.  Books helped me with this.

 

At any rate, I have been happy to be a reader, and I still wish to see myself as a reader.  I have no regrets over any book I have read, no matter if it was difficult or mindlessly simple, no matter if I found myself agreeing with the author, or disagreeing vehemently.  Each and every book showed me some perspective on the world outside of my own, and often I was most surprised by the books I least expected to be surprised by. 

 

Still my plan is to read less in 2022.  My goal is 60 books, and I would be very happy if that is all I read.  I will also be happy if I read more, or even less.  I have other things I want to do with my time, and although those things do involve social engagement, I also find I have no desire to be out in the world as much as I was prior to 2020.  In short it is all an adjustment.  Who knows where it will all lead.

 

Note that already my reading was tapering off in December:  6 books, 5 of them fiction.  The one non-fiction book, Avrum Bluming's Estrogen Matters, was a reread.  I had read it the first time in April, so technically, although there are 140 books listed, that one was listed twice, for a total of 139 books.

 

135. Edwige Danticat: Claire of the Sea Light.

136. Alice Hoffman: The Marriage of Opposites.

137. Joy Jordan-Lake:  Under a Gilded Moon.

138. Avrum  Bluming: Estrogen Matters.

139. Louise Penny: Still Life.

140. Jean Stafford: Boston Adventure.

 

Edwige Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light takes place in Haiti in the seaside village of Ville Rose.  The center of the novel is the occasion of Claire Limye Lanme's 7th birthday and in many ways the action of the book weaves its way around this center, much like a circular maze, using Claire's story to tell the story of the village, its history, its residents, as well as the story of Claire herself.  In the first part of the book we get a fairly straight-forward explication of Claire's story up until the time of this birthday, and Claire closes out the novel, making a decision about her own place in this intricately woven web.  In between these two points, the story moves forward, backward, and often sideways, showing us the interconnected lives that make up this place, and which make up the underlying foundation on which Claire's life is built.  It is a fascinating, and often poetically told story.  Despite the name of the novel, Claire is not the main character, she is simply a point of light around which all these other stories come into focus and are told.  It is a beautiful and compelling novel, although the story line is often convoluted and will frustrate the less than focused reader.    It is as much the story of a place as of a person, and in fact the story of each person is as much the story of the place and the people that shaped them.  Claire initially seems as much an idea, a creature of mist and yearning as she seems a child, just because of the way the story focuses around her but not on her.   As the stories weave together, the reader also begins to see how Claire will, herself, become interwoven into the story of this place, and this place will be interwoven into her own story.

 

Alice Hoffman's The Marriage of Opposites also takes place in the Caribbean but it is an entirely different kind of novel, much more in the vein of classic historical fiction.  It is the story of Rachel Pomie Petit Pizarro, the mother of the painter Camille Pissarro, beginning with her childhood in the prosperous Jewish community in Saint Thomas and ending in France.  Hoffman paints a fascinating and occasionally maddening portrait of Rachel and through this rather good historical novel she also allows the reader to explore the precarious situation of women in early 19th century colonial life.  Rachel's stories, and her descriptions of Saint Thomas seem to flow from some of Pissarro's work.  I am certain this is intentional as Hoffman tries to weave together the little we know of Pissarro's family with what we do know of his work as an artist.  I found the story also fascinating because it explores the Jewish culture of St. Thomas, where there had been a strong sephardic Jewish community since 1700. Hoffman's description of the synagogue itself is particularly beautiful, blending a bit of magic with historical reality in the understanding and eyes of a child, the young Rachel. The telling drove me back down memory lane, allowing me to relive my own experience of visiting the synagogue of Congregation Beracha Veshalom Vegmiluth Hasadim in St Thomas, which is one of the oldest standing synagogue I have personally been to.  This one is the second oldest building built as a synagogue in the Untied states, having been built in 1832, and it is still in use. 

 

From there, and continuing in the historical fiction vein, I read Joy Jordan Lake's Under a Gilded Moon, which concerns the Vanderbilts and the building of  the Biltmore Estate in nearby Asheville, North Carolina.  This was a book club choice, I believe partially chosen because it is about local, or at least regional history.  The novel shows the sharp dichotomy between the Vanderbilts, including their friends and kin, and their attitudes toward the poorer residents of the region. I felt it was particularly good at describing the beauty of the scenery. It suffered from attempting to add in too many "real people" and "real places", as if somehow it had to be a survey of all that was once here, at the expense of the story line.  It was clear a great deal of research went into the novel but the detail overwhelmed the story, resulting in inconsistently tenuous connections and gaps in the plot.  Still the novel did open a discussion into the roots of the divisions and attitudes, between rich and poor, attitudes that we still struggle with to this day.

 

For my other book group, i reread Still Life, the first of Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache novels.  I enjoyed reading it the second time as much as I had the first, which makes me think I will enjoy it again and again, and it was good, from this perspective to see how many of the characters who might take center stage in later novels are introduced here.  

 

Lastly I read Jean Stafford's early novel Boston Adventure, which proved to be a difficult choice.  The novel itself was good although at times tedious.  It is a carefully painted and studied portrait of Boston Society in the mid 20th century told from the perspective of an outsider, a poor girl, who is brought into the circle but who is never really a part of it.  In many ways it is a fascinating study of social isolation, perhaps not the best thing to read when our entire culture has been experimenting with a different vein of social isolation.  It is also a fascinating study of the cruelty that is often contained in social "kindnesses", in the way that persons of one class or milieu often, in the name of "helping", create effective prisons without explicitly meaning to do so. It was a worthwhile novel, but not perhaps the best airplane reading, where I would have done better with one (or four) short frivolous novels.

 

Previous months:
January, February, March, April, May, June, July1 and July2, August, September, October, November.

 

 

 

Sometimes life just gets the better of us, despite all of our good intentions, despite all our efforts to bear up and soldier on, and sometimes there is no recourse, or perhaps no healthy recourse, other than to allow oneself to be caught in the tide, washing up wherever one will.

 

November was, in many ways, a difficult month.  During that last 10 days or so of radiation therapy I was just done, mentally exhausted perhaps more even than physically exhausted.   Although I had allowed myself to be sick, allowed myself to stay in bed as needed, allowed myself to shirk responsibility, I hadn't really allowed myself the option of wallowing, of hosting my own private pity party, of tossing myself headlong into escapism and grief.  And then November hit.

 

As you may recall, I ended October with a novel in Fern Michaels' Sisterhood series.  I went on to open November with a binge-read, finishing the first nine novels in the series over the course of twelve or so days. When I wasn't reading I wasn't doing much else either, other than flouncing about or hiding in bed.  I have no real regrets about that; I needed to allow ennui full access, allowing it to simply run its course and die from exhaustion.

 

In fact, were I not so generally listless and in need of escape, I might not have enjoyed these books as much as I did.  Michaels is a story-teller, not a writer, and the novels very much follow a simple formula.  This is the crime; this is the punishment; how does one then make the story work.  As I mentioned before, this is pure simple escapist and revenge fantasy and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.  They read like a literary equivalent of a Lifetime movie.  I would want to say Hallmark, but they get perhaps a little too gritty on the revenge side for that, at least in some of the volumes.  There is no nuance, no sophistication, no real character development, and yet they were exactly the escapist distraction I needed.

119. Fern Michaels: Weekend Warriors

120. Fern Michaels:  Payback.

121. Fern Michaels:  Vendetta

122.  Fern Michaels:  The Jury.

124. Fern Michaels: Sweet Revenge

125.  Fern Michaels:  Lethal Justice

126. Fern Michaels:  Free Fall.

127. Fern Michaels: Hide and Seek.

128. Fern Michaels:  Hokus Pokus.

 

If you were observant, you may have noticed a gap.  

 

Somewhere in the middle of that list, about the time of my last treatment, of ringing the bell, of celebrating the joy of finally being done, I threw myself into a literary novel, and a very good one at that.  It didn't hold, that focus, and I was back to fantasy fiction before I knew it, but enough of that.

 

123. Richard Powers:  Bewilderment.  I found this slim novel entrancing, moving, powerful, provocative, and bewildering.  I intend all of that in the very best way, but it also may have been slightly more than I was ready to deal with at the time.   It is the story of Thomas, an astrobiologist, who is raising his nine-year old son, Robin, following the death of his wife some years previously; but the novel is both more and less than one particular story line.  Thomas is thinly drawn, often rather one-dimensional, and also far too clueless, even for a trope. Sometimes too much weight is placed on Robin, not that children can't be wise beyond their years, or fragile in ways that we, as adults have long forgotten.  But the story is deeply affecting and even the sometime glib characterizations play an important role in this.  It is the story of a family struggling; it is a story of a struggling earth and the damage mankind is inflicting on it; it is a story of scientific ethics; it is an overtly political novel; it is an overtly humanistic novel.  In short it is a short novel that can be read on many levels in many ways, and that will both entrance some, myself included, and annoy others.   

 

I found  the tile of Bewilderment entirely apt.  Mostly it is exactly that, the story of our own bewilderment.  Thomas is a bewildered single father, struggling to deal with the needs of his son in the face of the expectations of society, neither of which he fully grasps; he is a man most comfortable with his science. Robin is a child probably somewhere on the spectrum, but his father wishes to avoid labels and drugs. Robin is preternaturally bright, a trait inherited from both of his parents, and emotionally unstable.  He is bewildered by humanity, by the learned behavior humanity embraces, especially as this behavior appears contradictory to the natural world Robin so keenly observes. Bewilderment is also portrayed in the glimpses we are given of the life of the mother, Alyssa, (A – Lyssa, or not-fractious) who fights against the destruction of the natural world and yet struggles to contain her own emotions and anger at said destruction.  Robin is very much the blossoming of the union of Thomas and Alyssa, neither of whom fit into the world completely, into something new — a new beginning, which alas does not survive the bewilderment of the world into which it is born.  I do believe there is a lesson in this, as well as the most telling lesson in this book, which is not the bewilderment of the primary characters, or the bewilderment of the natural world, which is ongoing, but the bewilderment of humanity at its own destructive tendencies.  In this novel the complacency, ignorance, and willful blindness are their own kind of bewilderment, a bewilderment of unseen consequences.  What choice does one make when the alternatives are bewilderment or retreat into a comforting complacency? Do we chose bewilderment? Or would we rather be comfortably numb? Can we learn? Or is it already too late?  Will we change, or will we retreat into our own solace, our own grief, our own bubbles?  There are no real answers here, but despite all the big questions, there is quite a bit of humanity.

 

129. Heather Busch's  Why Cats Paint. This slim art book proved to be a humorous romp.  Yes, it is a book for cat lovers.  Yes it is about cats making messes with paint, as well as making messes with other things.  It is a brilliant satire of both the culture of cat lovers and the elitism of the art wold. A good reminder not to take oneself too seriously.

 

Having gotten all that out of my system, my reading settled down. Here is the remainder of the list.

 

130. Booker T. Washington: Up from Slavery.

131.  Maggie O'Farrell:  Hamnet.

132. Hillary Rodham Clinton: State of Terror.

133. Tommy Orange:  There, There

134.  W.E.B. DuBois: The Souls of Black Folk.

 

Although they are not sequential on the list, I am going to discuss Up From Slavery and The Souls of Black Folk together primarily because they have formed their own conversation in my thoughts.  I had heard of both authors of course but do not believe I had read either.  They should both be part of some essential syllabus that is required reading for what it means to be educated in America, along with the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.  In fact, I wish I had read them as a teenager, when I was reading both of the latter.  But I also realize that both men, Washington, and DuBois, write in ways that are not really accessible to teenagers today, and that we do not really teach historical context, historicity, or train young people in how ideas change and evolve, and how our own thoughts are changed by shifting tides of ideas and events that often really have little to do with the original context facing the writer of the words themselves.  I suppose I continue to hold onto the hope that such a world is possible. 

 

I found both books fascinating and equally valid but quite different.  DuBois does not agree with Washington's stance.  I am not certain Washington would have agreed with DuBois, but that is not the point.  I am also not convinced that Washington was an "Uncle Tom" and although I know what the term means, I also struggle with the idea that the Uncle Tom most of us know is the one portrayed in movies and on television, and that Uncle Tom is but a shadow of the original Uncle Tom as he was written.  Dismissing Washington as an Uncle Tom, the idea of the Uncle Tom itself, is a fiction, a trope for a two dimensional world that refuses to acknowledge nuance, or reality.  It is simpler, but not true.

 

But I have wandered into the weeds.  Both works are shocking at times; both are moving, often most moving when talking, almost off-handedly, of deeply personal things.  Both writers are most revealing when they are also the most oblique, when they hint at the vastness of things not said.  DuBois' essays are meticulously argued, but it is the poetry of the personal stories that resonate.  One cannot understand where we were without reading both, just as you cannot understand where we are now without also reading MLK and Malcolm X.  

 

And then back to fiction, my comfort zone.

 

Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet has resided on my shelves since its initial publication and I am only now getting to it.   Once I started I wondered why I had put it off so long.  This is fine historical fiction.  Set in Stratford in the late 16th Century it is the story of the young William Shakespeare, although he is actually never named here, his wife, Anne Hathaway, and the loss of their son, Hamnet.    Hamnet was apparently another spelling of the name Hamlet, which I knew; my early English literature training coming to the fore here.  In so many ways our obsession with proper spelling of names is such a modern thing.   O'Farrell imagines Hathaway as a strong, resourceful, fierce and creative young woman, the kind of young woman to which an observant and poetic young man might be drawn.  The setting is convincing, the story as well, and the author ties in the few known facts about Shakespeare's personal life into the story in convincing, if not always historically accurate,  ways.   Anne and Will never really overcome the rift created between them over Hamnet's death, although the drift was already present.  It was always evident that young Will's imaginings that he would take his wife to London were at odds with everything we were shown about her character; as well as many of the realities of life in 16th century England.  This did not surprise me, knowing that it was not unusual for families to stay behind, and I was grateful that O'Farrell did not fall into the modern assumption that Hathaway was a shrew simply because she stayed in Stratford.  But more than just a beautiful and heart-warming story, Hamnet is also an exploration of loss and the transformative origins and consolations of art. 

 

Next I read the new Louise Penny/Hillary Clinton political thriller, State of Terror, and I actually enjoyed it more than I anticipated.   It is a well-crafted political thriller and it read like a good mix of the two authors voices.  I am not certain I am happy about some of the connections made with Penny's Three Pines characters, I suppose these had to be added in to satisfy Penny's fans.  There is also a lot of sarcasm and political pay-back, which I did expect, and although some of it bordered on off-putting, generally the story got moving quickly enough that one just let it slip.  It always seems to me that a fair amount of suspension of disbelief is required in these novels anyway.  It was a gripping read that I didn't really want to put down. Although I suspect that the political machinations and insights are not as off-base as my heart would prefer, I did find it lacking in the empathetic insights of Penny's Three Pines voice.  This was no cozy mystery.   The ending left open the possibility of another novel, but I am not certain I would follow through, even if the authors do.

 

Lastly, I read There, There by Tommy Orange.  This was a novel that completely surprised me.  I don't remember why I put it on my library hold list, a recommendation from a friend probably, but I absolutely loved it.   The opening chapter is explosively passionate and I was completely captured by the voice, by the changing voices, by the palpable anger and confusion and even poetry of emotion and loss. This novel is told from the point of view of several characters, telling stories that initially seem disconnected but eventually come together to form a complexly woven whole.  Sometimes the transition between the stories seemed choppy; sometimes the stories seemed incomplete, and I cannot say it was the easiest read,  but I gradually came to recognize that this was intentional, a part of the story itself.  There is some confusion around the timeline just as there is confusion in the characters understanding of themselves, their place in society, and their own history — the very state of existence known as Native American.  

 

The title of the novel is taken from a famous quote by Gertrude Stein, about Oakland, where the novel mostly takes place, when she stated that there was no "there, there" meaning the Oakland of her childhood was no longer evident in the 'there' of contemporary Oakland.  Of course this is always the case for all of us, but in this novel that meaning is even more profound as the characters are trying to reconcile the "there" of their modern lives in Oakland with an almost mythological "there" of their heritage, something to which many of the characters have no knowledge or palpable connection, other than the fact that they are judged for being Native American and they yearn for some defining story to make sense of their lives.  This is an incredibly powerful novel, filled with raw emotion.  Orange captures the feelings of these characters so that something of each of them and their struggles sneak under the skin of the reader.  Never have I read anything so powerfully soul-wrenching about the experience of alcoholism, or being a child born with fetal alcohol syndrome.  Never have I felt such raw yearning.  I can't say it was a favorite book because it was too shocking to be so classified; but I will certainly look for future work from this author, and my view of the world will never be the same. 

 

'Tis the last day of November,

And what do I do?

I struggle to publish

A book list for you……

 

Bad attempts at poetry not withstanding, I will get my October reading out of the way, if only so that I can start on the November list, hopefully before my December gets out of hand.  

 

It may already be too late for that, of course.  November seems to be simultaneously a time when I have mustered energy and strength enough to begin putting the routines of daily life back to rights while at the same time, shoving my shoulders to the door and bracing my feet to keep it from bursting wide open with the calls and demands of worldly too muchness.

 

But…….Books

 

My October reading was, for the most part, light and inconsequential, not that there is anything to complain of in that.  I was in undergoing radiation therapy.  I had days of increasing strength and energy, and days where I would have happily stayed in bed.  I was frustrated that, although I was feeling increasingly better as chemo therapy drugs were dissipating from my systems and my body was beginning the long process of healing from the onslaught, neuropathy continued to be a problem.  I wanted it all to be done.  Very human that, as also is the impetus to escape into something silly and or distracting.

 

114. October started off with The Guest Book by Sarah Blake.  Oh my, was this a frustrating read!  In fact, had it not been for a book group, I would have abandoned this book fairly early on.  

 

Surprisingly, although I struggled through the five-hundred some-odd pages of dissatisfied whining by wooden characters in a novel with no core, no heart, nothing to grab onto, there were parts of this novel, certain themes, that persistently stayed glued in my thoughts. Yes, I thought. Yes, I wondered.  Yes, I wished that the author had been less scattered in her focus on big themes, and had more adept at tying them together in deeper development of at least one character.  There is a lot that could have been explored here:  A multi-generational family saga, an island in Maine, family secrets, so much to explore.  But it wasn't really explored, just listed, and almost analyzed through the overlapping stories of three generations of women, except that this interleaving of experiences never quite worked, and this reader never really connected with any of the three women.  

 

Blake was taking on big questions and alas, the questions overwhelmed the novel.  Rather than deft emotional exploration we were given minutia, pat answers and cliché. This book left me yearning for a different book; it could have been so much more relevant, revealing, even rewarding had there been less attention paid to throwing in circumstances and greater focus on the personal repercussions caused by the ripple of those circumstances. I found the novel to be less than satisfying, even if thought provoking.  No regrets however: it was worth reading the book if only for the group discussion, which was far more interesting than the novel itself.  In that sense, I would have to say it was a good book club novel; depending on the temperament of the club itself.

 

Book 115:  Charming Falls Apart by Angela Terry.  This sweet, charming, bit of fluff, chick lit at its best, just made me happy.  It didn't take long to read, and the story was predictable, but those were not problems here.  The story, about a young woman who loses her job and her fiancé on one fateful day, and has to find her way back from this upset of her "perfect" life, is just fun to read.  There is humor and growth, and yes a bit of sappiness as well, but it was the perfect book for me at the time.  The gentle exploration of vulnerability and self-mockery exploited by self-help books was particularly adept. Sometimes one needs something that just brightens the spirits, and does it with a light hand. 

 

116. I went into Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken with high hopes.  I was disappointed although it is not necessarily a bad book.  Perhaps it is just that the passage of time has not played well with Hawken's thesis.  It is actually a very good survey of millions of small NGOs from around the world, of the desire of people to effect change, and a cataloging of the, mostly local, desire of humans to change direction  and return to some kind of biological, environmental, and humane sanity.    But he is trying to define this movement as a coherent movement, despite its incoherence.  Hawken acknowledges the localness of the human condition, and even makes efforts to point out that the global human community and its impact does not depend on agreement on specifics, but acknowledgement of the common humanity that includes our differences.  He fails in that he focuses too greatly on labeling a movement, even as he acknowledges that a defining focus cannot exist.  I found the book naively optimistic.  

 

A quote from the introduction stuck with me though, and it defines much of the tenor of this book, and hits home with me in my own views of life:

 

If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren't pessimistic, you don't have the correct data.  If you meet the people in this unnamed movement and aren't optimistic, you haven't got a heart.   (4.1.4)

 

117. Next, I picked up James Baldwin's slim but profound volume, The Fire Next Time.. Baldwin's passionate voice, the intelligence of his observations and his prose are still highly relevant even over half a century after this book was written.  Baldwin writes about being black in America, about how black Americans see white Americans, and chillingly so, how whites do not see themselves.  It is a book that is easily read in one sitting, and yet I kept coming back to it over the course of several days.  Absorption took weeks. I saw Baldwin's insights in other books, other events in my life, changing my thoughts, still.  I think this is a book everyone should read, a book that I wish I had read when I was 15, when I was reading the writings of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.  I didn't know about James Baldwin at that time. In my own, admittedly naive in some ways, worldview, this and quite a few primary sources would be taught and read by all teenagers when they study American History. But that would require a world that took a different view of itself.  Whereas the more pessimistic side of myself believes the only lesson history teaches us is that we don't learn the lessons of history.

 

I ended the month with more frivolity.  I talked to my mom on October 31, and she mentioned a book she had found in the library at her assisted living facility, Safe and Sound by Fern Michaels.  I was tired and overwhelmed, I needed an easy read, and I was able to download it from the local library system to my kindle right then and there.  So I read it.

 

118. This is volume 29 in Michaels' Sisterhood series, but I didn't know that when I picked it up.  It was still an entertaining read, quickly finished in just a couple of hours.  I will say up front that I do not like most of Michaels' romance novels, but I enjoyed this, and I went on to a bit of a mini-binge into the beginning of November.  The novel is meant to pull at the heart-strings:  a lonely, abused, child in trouble, women who want to protect him, and inflict punishment on those who cause this charming boy harm. The Sisterhood is a series about female vigilantes.  It is pure over-the-top female revenge fantasy where bright ambitious women take on the ills of the world.  No one is killed, but that does not mean that punishment and retribution are not occasionally quite violent.  Yes, I loved it.  I can say that even as the punishment in this particular case made me squirm, although I also understood it.  

 

We are complex  and inconsistent, we humans, aren't we?  No point in pretending otherwise.