Season’s Readings: Notable Books read in year 2004 by Eva. Order is not significant.

• The Fountainhead , by Ayn Rand (1905-1982. Born in Russia. Emigrated to America in the 1920’s) ©1943. Ellie Cirignano said "Oh, I read that riding the bus to work in Waltham." "But you worked at Fin Pub in Boston since the 1940’s" "Before Financial I worked in Waltham." Howard Roark, unconpromising genius architect, is superman, and Dominique Franken his soulmate. #1 is his work, #2 is Dominique. Howard is so self-assured he never has to ask anyone else’s opinion or advice. Ellsworth Toughy is the villain. Gale Weinart is the most sympathetic supporting character. Peter Keating is the average mediocrity. I was completely absorbed while reading this but I felt cheated at the end. I never did understand the psychological sado-masochism in the book which I suppose I thought would come clear in the end. Several characters enjoy manipulating people so that they are between a rock and a hard place. Either way they sell out, because unlike Howard Roark, they don’t have just one objective. Collectivism is bad. The pursuit of happiness is good. The characters were each one dimensional, though memorable.
• A Death in the Family by James Agee, read by Mark Hammer. This won the Pulitzer prize in 1957, when it was published 2 years after Agee’s untimely death. It’s set in 1915 in Knoxville TN. Jay Follett, 36, dies in an automobile accident. The story is told from the point of view of his 6 year old son Rufous. We get a beautifully rendered sketch of the family before the death, and then a very detailed one of the breaking news and then the funeral. Some of the family are Catholic, others not. Rufous picks up on that.
• An Execution in the Family by Robert Meeropol, son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Robert was b. 1947, his brother Michael in 1943. Ethel and Julius were executed in June 1953. I turned again and again to the photographic plates. There was only one Meeropol in the NYC telephone directory, and pages of Rosenbergs. As young adults Michael and Robert considered changing their name back to Rosenberg to gain anonymity. Once after a lecture a student approached Robert and told him "I hope you won’t think poorly of me when I tell you that my uncle was Irving Saypol" (the prosecutor in the Rosenberg trial). "My uncle was David Greenglass," quipped Robert. David Greenglass was Ethel’s brother who testified against the Rosenbergs to gain leniency for himself. Robert told me the kinds of things I want to know about a life. He and his brother are my contemporaries.
• Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry. 12 cassettes. My book group and I loved this brilliant novel about a Parsi family in 1990’s Bombay. One thread is about Nari, a 79 yr old rapidly becoming totally dependent on his children and stepchildren, none of whom are prepared for their new roles. When Nari’s son-in-law Jizar tells the story of his application to emigrate to Canada I saw parallels with my job search. Jizar is an experienced store manager and salesman at Bombay Sports, but the interviewer qizzed him on particulars of Canadian sports, and concluded he did not have the capacity to do that line of work in Canada. Jizar’s son Johangir was perfectly pitched. The book has neither a happy nor a sad ending, but rather completes a circle of ups and downs. There were places where things got so sad and desperate I had to turn off the tapedeck and open An Execution in the Family for relief, but also there were moments of grace, as when Daisy came to play her violin at Nari’s deathbed. I liked this book so much that when I saw another Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance, at the library I snapped it up. That one was a finalist for the Booker prize. If the Booker committee can live with the coincidences I can too. Mistry flaunts this device like the Pompidou center architect let the pipes show. A Fine Balance is set largely in the 1975 Emergency when civil liberties were suspended. Scary!
• The World Below by Sue Miller, unabridged on 6 cassettes. I loved the account of the narrator’s grandmother’s youth, starting with the Sanatorium and her love affair with Seward Wallace, 17, which never would have happened outside the special atmosphere of the San in 1920. The misunderstanding between Georgia and her suitor (who was her doctor) was also fascinating. I am interested in nuances of people’s feelings in love relationships and this book got it right. Georgia was scrupulously honest. She confessed squirelling away some household funds. Her husband opened her own bank account for her after that, which was breaking new ground in those days. This novel was about piecing together a grandparent’s romances from diaries and letters.
• The Man from Clear Lake. Earth Day Founder Senator Gaylord Nelson, by Bill Christofferson I have a new political hero. Too bad he’s 88. Nelson was Governor of Wisconsin 1958-62, then served in the U.S. Senate until swept away in the Reagan landslide of 1980. Since then he’s been working at the Wilderness Society. As a child, when his father took him to hear a La Follette speech, Gaylord said he wanted to be a politician but he was afraid Fighting Bob La Follette would have solved everything by the time he grew up. Nelson introduced the legislation to ban DDT. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (Johnson called it the 443-to-4 vote) was used by Johnson just like the carte blanche congressional vote on Iraq was used by Bush, to justify all.
• Living History by Hilary Clinton. Nora Doran told me she could not put it down so I got it at the library and thought it was real good too. The Clintons are contemporaries of mine, and Hilary even comes from the Chicago area, so I can relate to the historical context of their personal trajectories. Getting Hilary’s take on all the news during the Clinton presidency put that in a framework.
• Truth at any Cost, Ken Starr and the Unmaking of Bill Clinton by Susan Schmidt and Michael Weisskopf sees the Clinton presidency from yet another perspective. It’s like stereographic picures but everybody hates Linda Tripp. Starr was given no time or budget limits, which for a scrupulous fundamentalist bent on uncovering any wrongdoing, was bad. There was no sense of proportion. Another political book this election year: On the way home from Rochester at Thanksgiving Herman and I listened to The Price of Loyalty, George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill by Pulitzer-winning reporter Ron Suskind. The most salient points from the book had been quoted in The Nyer but I still liked hearing about how the day to day job of being Secretary of the Treasury felt for 2 years, and about O’Neill’s decision to take the job—he was just retiring from being CEO of Alcoa. O’Neill was ignored and insultingly left out of the loop like Colin Powell (my comparison, not his). He wanted to use a portion of the Clinton surplus to save Social Security (with private accounts, which I’m skeptical of, but I like the idea of saving Social Security), and if we must have tax cuts he wanted triggers, which meant the tax cuts would be turned off if the surplus dried up. He was fired. O’Neill sees Dick Cheney, whom he formerly liked, as a powerful and secretive ideologue now. In Worse than Watergate John Dean says cynics say "If anything happens to Cheney, Bush would be president."
• Lost in America, A Journey with my Father, by Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., read by the author. Herman and I listened to this on the way to Rochester at Thanksgiving. It’s a portrait of Meyer Nudelman, as seen by his son. Meyer emigrated from Russia to the Bronx at age 19 in the early 20^th century. When Sherwin was in grade school his father developed an unsteady faltering gait and a syndrome of other health problems that became progressively worse and embarrassed his sons. In medical school Sherwin found himself reading an uncanny description of his father’s health history, then looked back to see what it was: a syphillic lesion on the nervous system. Sherwin had a hard time getting his mind around that. His brother Harvey died 40 years later without knowing. Sherwin only discussed it with Meyer’s doctor who already knew. Meyer died when Sherwin was 28. Sherwin regrets that neither ever told the other that he loved him. Another thread: Sherwin has had periodic serious bouts of depression, one lasting 4 years.
• Three Junes by Julia Glass. 9 cassettes read by John Keating. The 2002 National Book Award winner, and another enjoyable selection by my book group. Set in Scotland, Greenwich Village, Greece, and Long Island. Fenno, the oldest of three brothers, narrates. Each son is an individual. They settled in three different countries with three quite different vocations and lifestyles.
• The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, Discovering a forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier ©2000 By Thad E. Carhart. 9 hrs. Read by Dan Cashman. Great memoir of an American expatriot’s fascination with the piano. He was an enthusiastic, though not gifted, amateur player. I loved the description of proprietor Luc’s relationship to his vocation. I wonder if Daniel Mason read this before writing his novel The Piano Tuner. The engineering and craft aspects of pianos in both books fascinated me, and Erards were a brand mentioned in both. The Piano Shop also addressed the issue of how children are best educated in music. I loved it.
• The Girl Who Played Go by Shan Su. Katherine Wolfthal recommended this novel which I was able to get via interlibrary loan. It is a small hardback of 312 pages, barely bigger than a paperback. Shan Su was born in Beijing in 1972. In 1990 she left for Paris. This is her third novel. It’s set in Manchuria during the time of the Japanese occupation in the 1930’s. Chapters are written alternately from the perspective of a Japanese soldier and a Chinese 18 yr old who played Go with him in the park. He speaks Mandarin because he had a Chinese nursemaid, so he can and does play in mufti. I was impressed by how this young author managed to capture how both narrators lives felt on a daily basis, how they felt about other people and their Go game, all against the weighty events going on around them. It started out slowly, then I really got into it and recognized it as a quality book.
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon. ©2003 My book group selected this. The cover says the protagonist, Christopher, "has Asberger’s Syndrome, a condition similar to Autism," but the condition is never named in the novel. Christopher lives in Swindon, U.K. I tutored a 14 yr old boy this year who was diagnosed as autistic, so I sought insight.
• Jewel by Bret Lott. Abridged to 4 cassettes. This novel was so realistic Herman asked if it was a true story. Jewel is an intelligent, high-school educated, poor wife and mother living in Purvis, MS in 1943 when her 6^th child, Brenda Kay, is born with Down’s syndrome. In 1953 the family moved to California, because Jewel had read in Reader’s Digest about a school there for "Exceptional Children" and Leston’s work in Mississippi had dried up with the end of WW II. Still it was hard for Jewel to convince him to try CA. the Hilbrands had 10 good years in LA when Leston announced they would return to MS. Jewel was dead set against it but she went. The book contains American attitudes towards race, and how they evolved over time and geography. We also get some flashbacks to Jewel’s hardscrabble childhood—she was born in the first decade of the 20th century.
• O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. ©1913. Alexandra Bergson, 20, becomes the de facto head of the family after her father’s death. She has 2 strapping younger brothers, Oscar and Lou, a much younger brother, 5 year old Emil, and a mother. All but Emil were born in Sweden, but now (1885) they have a farm in Nebraska. The book flash forwards about 2 years, and then 15 more years. Economically the region has done a 180. There’s a thwarted illicit love affair and an attempt to thwart Alexandra’s licit one.
• The Whore’s Child and Other Stories by Richard Russo. I listened to most of the title story with MaryDan driving to Stony Brook State Park (where we swam in the rushing stream with waterfalls). But then the CD started skipping. So I had to get the BOP (book on paper) at the library, to find out how it ended. The Mysteries of Linwood Hart, and The Joy Ride were other good ones.
• Selected Stories read by the author, Grace Paley. I listened to some of them on the way home from the Go Congress in Rochester in August in the presence of Micah who told me Grace Paley was an acquaintance of Teddy’s in the Village. When a poor woman is offering to take in her dying friend’s son this thought is running through her head. "He’s growing up. Pretty soon he’s going to be needing an encyclopedia." Grace Paley’s physical voice fit the authorial voice, I thought. Flat, plain, and unpretentious.
• The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler. Unabridged on 9 CDs. Read by Blair Brown. Pauline, 20, walked into Anton’s grocery store in a Polish neighborhood of Baltimore in December 1941 and Michael Anton fell for her on the spot. We get scenes from this family saga every several years until the present. The Antons’ oldest daughter, Lindy, runs away to Haight Ashbury during the ‘60’s. After 30 years of marriage Michael and Pauline get divorced. Seven years later Michael re-marries. A book group selection. Many in the group thought this book fell short. I thought it was a good read.
• Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini. The day I finished it I stayed up until 3:30 am even though it was a work night. I now have a picture of Afghanistan in the 1970’s, and the Afghan immigrant community in the U.S. up to 2001. I don’t think Hassan would ever tell his father about the worst day of his childhood, let alone within 6 months of the event. To me any awful event is greatly mitigated by being able to tell someone, and this book hinges on this event being awful. The author and I are agreed, though, that for the narrator, who experienced the pivotal event from another perspective, the pain was exacerbated by never telling anyone for 30 years. The part about how difficult it is to adopt a traumatized 10 year old seemed very real. Overall this is one powerful book.
• Miles From Nowhere. Round the World Bicycle Adventure by Barbara Savage 11 cassettes. ©1987. In 1977 Barbara and Larry Savage, a couple in their twenties approaching their 5^th wedding anniversary, quit their jobs in California and set off on a 2 year bicycle camping tour through 25 countries. This is a really well written adventure travelogue, and has humor and relationships as well. I was shocked to learn that as this book was awaiting publication Barbara was killed while bicycling locally, in an accident with a truck. They had survived so many life-threatening situations on the trip. Barbara left the world a very fine book.