Season's Readings 2010

My Favorites

Non-Fiction

Actually read this in 2008, I think, but somehow forgot to put it on that year’s list. I loved it!

Very good. See excerpts.

7 or so CDs. Enjoyed it.

Fiction

12 cassettes. Set in the 1990s in Bombay (Mumbai). Nariman becomes bed-ridden with Parkinson's. He lives with his ungrateful stepdaughter and timid stepson. The stepdaughter cooks up a scheme to unload Nariman on his daughter Roxana, even though her apartment is tiny, and already full with her husband and two boys. This extended family are Parsis, and we eventually learn of a tragic love affair from Nariman's youth (his beloved was not Parsi, and therefore not accepted) that has long-term repercussions.

MP3. Colm Tóibín came to Rochester, and I very much enjoyed hearing him speak, and read from this book. So, I snapped it up when I saw it at the library on MP3 (my first book on MP3!). The audio book reader’s Irish accent and cadence added to the richness. Eilis Lacey emigrates from Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, Ireland, to Brooklyn, in the early 1950s. A couple of minor things didn’t ring quite true. Did little pink razors really exist in those days? Also, Eilis was pretty calm when, in the light of day, she confronted the reality that she could be pregnant.

Second Tier

Non-Fiction

7 CDs. One of his concepts is the "10,000-Hour Rule," which maintains that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.

Not exactly a book read for pleasure, but I did learn a lot.

7 or so CDs. Feynman was always willing to admit his own ignorance and his own errors: "I made a mistake, so the book is wrong ... and you goofed too, for believing me," he wrote to one student who had written to him. The student had gotten an exam question wrong after trusting something Feynman had said in one of his books. And Feynman could be charming: "Maybe it would help you with your problem about my being an American to know that my wife is an Englishwoman from Yorkshire. She has probably improved me greatly."

4 CDs, abridged. Alyce Adams recommended this book.

The author tries to help the reader transform the thinking, moralistic judgments, and language that keep us from enriching relationships. He has a whole line of workbooks, etc. Writing this summary now, some months after listening to this book, I can’t remember a single detail. Guess I need to refresh with one of his workbooks!

4 CDs. This was interesting, but not as good as I thought it would be, given that I heard mention of it everywhere I turned.

6 cassettes (12 lectures of 45 minutes each). Part of ‘The Great Courses’ from The Teaching Company. This was more than worth the $.50 I paid for it at a library sale (these gems are readily available, as the libraries transition from cassettes to CD/Audio eBooks).

Professor Weinstein started with Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, and went on to lecture on Washington Irving, Emerson, Thoreau, and Poe. See the Emerson quote, below.

Historical Fiction

12 CDs, read (or 'performed') by Barbara Rosenblat and Jeff Woodman.

Sharyn McCrumb does a nice job of making vivid the historic Frankie Silver case, which was tried in Morganton, NC. Frankie was 18 years old when she killed her inebriated husband. He came home to their one-room cabin on Dec 22, 1831, pointing a loaded pistol, and threatening to shoot their 13-mo-old Nancy, if Frankie couldn't get her to stop crying. That is according to the confession Frankie made to two different groups of citizens. But, it was too late to plead self-defense. She had already been convicted and sentenced. The author wraps the story with the modern-day story of Sheriff Spencer Arrowood, whose testimony put Fate Harkryder on death row. There are parallels between the two stories, unspoken, but there for the reader to draw on. (Interesting side point: I learned on the author’s website that the author used the name of her grandfather for the Spencer Arrowood character.)

The book on CD contains a bonus 13th CD, on which we hear the author talking about the research she did. This was actually my favorite part!

Library CD. I liked learning about the history. If there had not been an historical event behind this book, I would not have found it so worthwhile. Carrie McGavock lived from 1829 to 1905. The defining event in her life was the Franklin, TN Civil War battle of Nov 30, 1864, which broke out practically in her backyard. Her fine home and spacious grounds, Carnton, were commandeered for a field hospital. This historical novel imagines the details. By googling her later, I found out many fascinating details. This battle has been called "the bloodiest five hours of the Civil War." 9,500 soldiers were killed, wounded, captured, or went missing there, 7,000 of them Confederates.

The 1860 census shows the McGavocks owned 39 slaves living in 11 dwellings over 640 acres.

About a year and a half after the battle, Carrie and her husband created a proper cemetery on their land, and reburied the dead there. It is the largest privately-owned military cemetery in the nation. It is on the National Register of Historic Places, and one can take a tour of the house and cemetery. Bettina (who told me about this book) and Kirk have done this.

This book spent some time on the New York Times Best Seller list. Bettina tells me there’s another book she has since read on this same subject that she thought was better, The Black Flower, by Howard Bahr.

Fiction

7 or so CDs. Another one that I read in 2008, but missed on that year’s list. This book did not particularly appeal to me.

6 CDs. This is a Young Adult novel about a high school senior, James Sveck, in NYC, self-described as anti-social. He had been accepted at Brown, but was floating the idea of not going. His parents had no sympathy with this idea. He felt if they would just give him the money they would otherwise pay for his tuition, he could buy a little house in the Midwest, and live quietly, and learn by reading what he would otherwise learn in college.

CD. Jacob Jankowski is in a nursing home, and is either ninety or ninety-three (he forgets). The reader of the audio book did a GREAT job with Jacob’s voice, adding so much enjoyment to the book. Jacob floats back in his memory to his great adventure during the Depression. He had impulsively left veterinary school at Cornell just before his exams, distraught over the sudden death of his parents. The train he jumped onto happened to be a circus train. Then, in alternating chapters, the book brings us back to Jacob’s thoughts, there in the nursing home. All this was very well done, but yet the content of the book just wasn’t that appealing to me.

5 or so CDs. This is billed as a work of fiction, which it is, because the author comes right out and tells you that he is getting at the "story truth," not the literal truth. And that's fine. But here's the thing I don't like. He tells it in the first person, and the narrator has experiences that we know (or at least believe) Tim O'Brien had. So, it's very hard to disentangle it, and you keep slipping into thinking he is telling something that really happened. For example, if you read the book, you'll remember the story about the summer after "he" graduated from Macalaster, and he got his draft notice. He was working in a pork processing plant in Minnesota, and keeps toying with the idea of taking off for Canada. Finally, he does head north, and ends up as the only guest at Tip Top Lodge, a cluster of cabins in "sorry shape," on Rainy River. Elroy Berdahl is the proprietor, and just the person the narrator needs right then. Elroy doesn't judge or pry. I just can't help but feel cheated when I learn that Elroy Berdahl was made up out of whole cloth. (This is not revealed in the story, but rather I read it on the web, and also Tim O’Brien mentioned it when he spoke in Rochester.)

18 cassettes. The reader of this audiobook did a fabulous job. Both the writing and the reading were at their very best near the end, in bringing out the personality of Alex Mebane.

CD. The author of this novel is a 48-yr-old software developer in Colorado. This is his first book, and it is certainly a significant achievement. I was interested in the story while it lasted, but had no desire to reread it after it was over.

Not Recommended

The author tells of his high school days in the mid-1980s in Glencoe, IL, a North Shore suburb of Chicago. Nothing wrong with the writing, but it just didn’t resonate with me, perhaps because I was never a young man?

Lake Effect is about “the friendship of young men when girls are desired but still unfathomable objects, about bonds forged in cheap beer and borrowed cars and aimless adventures and talk late into the night, when it all feels important and exciting in some way you can't quite define and you can't imagine ever wanting any of it to change. And then it all changes, until there's nothing left of it but old stories you can't quite explain to your wife and in-jokes you no longer understand scrawled in your high school yearbook.” – Charlie Orion, on thewag.net

Book-related quotes, and quotes from books

You don't need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library.

- Lesley Conger

A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.

- Jo Godwin

Knowledge is free at the library. Just bring your own container.

- Unknown

Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one.

- Augustine Birrell

At the end of her book (Circling My Mother), when she is drawing some parallels with the painter Bonnard, Mary Gordon quotes him:

"At the end of his life, Bonnard said, "I am only now beginning to understand. I should start all over.""

Why They Write

"My books are like Appalachian quilts," says Sharyn McCrumb. "I take brightly colored scraps of legends, ballads, fragments of rural life, and local tragedy, and I piece them together into a complex whole that tells not only a story, but also a deeper truth about the culture of the mountain South."

____________________

Gerald Durrell wrote a trio of memoirs about the five idyllic years his family spent on the island of Corfu. For him, those years encompassed ages 10 to 15. In the preface to My Family and Other Animals, he explains something of why he writes:

I have attempted to draw an accurate and unexaggerated picture of my family in the following pages; they appear as I saw them. ... In order to compress five years of incident, observation, and pleasant living into something a little less lengthy than the Encyclopedia Britannica, I have been forced to telescope, prune, and graft, so that there is little left of the original continuity of events.

My thoughts as I contemplate that: “Telescoping, pruning, and grafting” is one thing—a good thing, surely—and Tim O’Brien’s “story truth” is a different thing. A place for each, I’m sure.

____________________

In Ava’s Man, Rick Bragg wanted to capture a man’s history that would have been otherwise overlooked. Description from the publisher’s blurb:

Charlie Bundrum was a roofer, a carpenter, a whiskey-maker, a fisherman who knew every inch of the Coosa River, made boats out of car hoods and knew how to pack a wound with brown sugar to stop the blood. He could not read, but he asked his wife, Ava, to read him the paper every day so he would not be ignorant. He was a man who took giant steps in rundown boots, a true hero whom history would otherwise have overlooked.

In the decade of the Great Depression, Charlie moved his family twenty-one times, keeping seven children one step ahead of the poverty and starvation that threatened them from every side. He worked at the steel mill when the steel was rolling, or for a side of bacon or a bushel of peaches when it wasn’t. He paid the doctor who delivered his fourth daughter, Margaret—Bragg’s mother—with a jar of whiskey. He understood the finer points of the law as it applied to poor people and drinking men; he was a banjo player and a buck dancer who worked off fines when life got a little sideways, and he sang when he was drunk, where other men fought or cussed. He had a talent for living.

Why They Read

"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition"

- Rudyard Kipling

Excerpts

Excerpt from the essay "Self-Reliance," 1841 by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has got a fine Geneva watch, but he has lost the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind.

- as quoted in Classics of American Literature

Excerpts from Circling My Mother

What did my mother think words were for? She was not a middle-class woman. She did not have conversations. She would have said, "I don't have that kind of time." No time devoted to talk for its own sake, talk that explored or played or followed something as you might follow the course of a stream. She did not describe things. She did not analyze. "I don't dwell on things. I don't harp on things, I don't dig things up like you. I can't afford it." She was impatient with people who spoke about scenery or food, who recounted the plots of movies. "I guess they have nothing to do but waste my time and theirs." "Waste my time." "I can't afford it." Her attitude implied a proper economy. A useful investment. How would time, for my mother, be used well? In work or prayer, she would have said. "But she was not a puritan; alongside work and prayer she believed in pleasure, and she enjoyed skirting indecency. It is a particularly Catholic combination: piety and profanity linking hands (a sign of large-minded and true comprehension of the world), bypassing entirely the respectable, a Protestant terrain.

...

When I was divorced from my first husband, she somehow got it into her head that we should have a conversation about my life. "I know that you're a divorceé," she said (pronouncing the word with a long "a" at the end, as if I were the star of a Fred Astaire movie), "and that men find you attractive. And I know why they find you attractive." I was shocked, wondering what the compliment might be: I was unused to a compliment. "Men find you attractive," she said, "because you're a god-damn fool."

...

When people would say, "Your mother must be very proud of you," I could honestly answer that I didn't know. It is an Irish trait, I think, the reluctance to praise a child, for fear of her getting "a swelled head." Or perhaps it was Italian: fear that praise would bring down the evil eye. My Jewish father had no compunction in naming me a genius at the age of five. The closest my mother ever came to complimenting me was her once telling a friend, "You know my daughter is the third-best writer in America." My friend was afraid to ask her who numbers one and two might be.

Note: Mary’s Jewish father converted to Catholicism. Mary’s Irish side comes from her maternal grandmother.

Most of Mary Gordon's aunts (her mother’s sisters) had a distinctly nasty streak. Witness this story about her Aunt Rita:

"My last sight of Rita was at my aunt Lil's funeral. My cousin had left an article about me out on the counter (he is my greatest ally among them), silently forcing the aunts and uncles to acknowledge my success, which none of them, except my aunt Lil and my uncle Ned, ever did. Rita picked up the newspaper, looked at my picture for a second, two, then crumpled it and threw it on the floor. "I looked at this and I saw it was garbage, so I figured you wanted it thrown away," she said to my cousin, who picked it up off the floor, smoothed it out, and took it out of the room as if it were a wounded animal."

Reviews I Liked

Brooklyn

Purging the immigrant novel of all swagger and sentimentality, Tóibín leaves us with a renewed understanding that to emigrate is to become a foreigner in two places at once.

- The New Yorker

There is little reconciliation in Colm Tóibín's novels; moments in which the stage is set for it usually pass. … His novels build to these moments, fraught with potential, from which the air goes out with a nasty little hiss, and a new chapter, full of reasons not to live, begins.... It's good to read Tóibín's honest novels, in which human beings fail to forgive, fail to understand. We spend so much of our lives in the dark, shouldn't literature face this as squarely as we must?

- Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times, 2000, in a general review of Colm Tóibín's work

From the review of Circling My Mother in The New York Times, Aug 26, 2007:

Accompanying the author while she comes to terms with her mother is thrilling, if harrowing.

... What’s inspiring about Circling My Mother is Gordon’s deeply personal portrayal of her mother. Anna Gagliano is not someone who feels she must have large ideas about what’s wrong with Catholicism. Instead, like those famous midcentury Catholics, Gordon’s mother attends to the nourishment of her own particular religious vocation, a vocation less glamorous than Merton’s and Day’s but no less divine—a vocation as a single mother, as one afflicted by polio, as a woman in full belief of the love of God.

From the review of Commitment by Nicola Barr at guardian.co.uk, Jan 10, 2010:

It isn't, thank God, a handbook for marriage. Nor is it a diatribe against it. Really, it's a study of intimacy, partnership and romantic love, and the possibility—or impossibility—of it in the 21st century, told in that effortlessly analytical, wittily self-deprecating, chummily wise voice that we all fell so hard for last time around.