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A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents—and Ourselves, Jane Gross

13 CDs. While not exactly a page-turner, I was interested in Jane’s honest account of her mother’s last three years, and how Jane and her brother Michael dealt with the situation.

9 CDs. The 16^th novel in the Detective Harry Bosch series. During the LA riots in 1992, Harry and his partner are

called to the scene of a dead white woman (“Snow White”) in an alley. They don’t have sufficient time to investigate because there is too much going on during the riots. The department reopens the cold cases just before the 20-yr anniversary of the riots, hoping to be able to report that some of the murders have been solved.

4 CDs, read by the author. I agree with the reviewer who said, “surprisingly serious and eloquently written.” Time magazine ranked it 6^th on its list of Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2007. Steve’s 14-yr stand-up career spanned the ‘70s, with a few years’ overflow at either end. He was born in August, 1945. I especially loved his account of his teenage and college years, and his relationship with his father. Bob read the book-on-paper and says it is a good layman’s summary of the art process.

5 CDs (abridged). This is the first book I read in the Detective Harry Bosch series (but this was the author’s 8^th book in that series). He’s an LA detective who likes chasing down clues. A homeowner / retired doctor on a dead end street in the canyon reports that his dog came down off the hillside with a human bone.

6 CDs. Engagingly read, with various Irish and Brooklyn accents. We first meet Marie as a small girl sitting on her stoop in Brooklyn, waiting for her father to come home. We follow her through two love affairs, her brother’s entering and leaving the priesthood, her later life with teen-aged children. Winner of the National Book Award.

Second Tier

Dear Life, Alice Munro.

Alice Munro is the winner of the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work. The story “Corrie” was intriguing, especially when I learned that there were three different endings (one when it was published in the New Yorker in 2011, one in an anthology (Apr 2012) and then the one in this book (Nov 2012). One quibble: I don’t think the story was clear enough about what Corrie had seen or heard at the funeral that convinced her of Howard Ritchie’s deception. Some of the stories had inconclusive endings, which I don’t like, but I’m not going to write a complaining letter to the author. (See comment by Francine Prose.)

In 2000, this author had written (with Ron Powers) Flags of Our Fathers (his father was one of the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima). In this book, he tells the story of eight American pilots (“flyboys”), most of whom were shot down in Feb & Mar of 1945 and ended up as POWs on Chichi Jima, an island twice the size of Manhattan’s Central Park. He also gives background history, putting Japan in context, and recounts in some detail the fire bombing of Tokyo. This was good, but not as memorable as Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand’s book about Louis Zamperini.

7 CDs. Very expertly read by Madhur Jaffrey. Steve Derne had bought this book/CD, and after reading (listening to) it, passed it on to me. This is the author’s first book, and she has since completed two more books in the trilogy, the second one being (according to what she said in the author interview on the final CD) a prequel to this one. The setting of this novel is East Pakistan at the time of the Bangladesh liberation war in 1971. The author was born in Bangladesh a few years after that, but was not raised there, due to her father’s international career. Her parents had been resistance fighters during the war—hence her interest in the period. The book was well-written, but its main value to me was that it made me realize how ignorant I was of that history, and now I want to learn more.

11 CDs. As Stan said, a good summer read. I looked forward to listening to this every day when I got in my car. But, in the end, the book was not satisfying. At EOY, the movie has just come out. But after reading reviews, I don’t think I’ll see it.

I told Eva about my 19^th Ward neighbor Maxine, and this book of hers. Eva surprised me with a gift of the book when Bob and I went to Boston to be Herman’s caretaker for a weekend. It was a well-timed gift, as it absorbed my complete attention on the long plane ride to and from Seattle in October. Maxine was the oldest of three daughters born to two profoundly deaf parents. ASL was her first language. And this is also about growing up black in a segregated world (she was born in 1943 and grew up at 59^th and Clay, in N.E. Washington, D.C.).

Aptly named, as this was a very small part of the story I hoped to hear. It only covered from 1917, when Agnes met Eugene O’Neill (on the heels of his affair with Louise Bryant, with whom he was still smitten, but she had left for Russia) through 1919. (Agnes planned another volume, which she never finished, that would have covered the rest of their years together; their marriage dissolved in 1929.) The story is told without emotion. I satisfied my curiosity by reading much more at www.eoneill.com.

5 CDs. I read this after seeing that it was one of NYT Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year. I am surprised they rated it that highly, though the writing was quite good. The author lost her husband, two boys, mother and father in the Dec 26, 2004 Sri Lankan tsunami. She briefly describes the horrific events of that day, and then chronicles her years of grief. It is a window into that world. Marvelously read by Hannah Curtis.

7 CDs. Just not a gripping read for me.

Not To My Taste

Graphic novel: the first book in a planned trilogy. I was disappointed in this (though the illustrations were quite good). Congressman Lewis has already told his story (with Michael D’Orso) in Walking with the Wind (1998). Perhaps I would like that better.

Children/Young Adult books

7 CDs. Memoir. 10-year-old Esther Rudomin was enjoying a charmed life with her extended family in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania) when, in 1941, she and her parents and grandparents and hundreds of her neighbors were suddenly rounded up and sent by train to Siberia. Her father was sent to fight in the Soviet army and her mother worked in a gypsum mine and bakery. Her grandfather died at 72 in a forced labor camp. After the war, her family reunited in Lodz, Poland, discovering that their forced exile had probably saved their lives. Of the 57,000 Jewish residents of Vilnius at the beginning of the war, only 3,000 survived. Thanks to Steve Derne for mentioning that he loved this, and spurring me to finally read this classic.

6 CDs. Winner of The National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. The author has already written three, and plans five in the series. Nice! Will recommend to Kim’s and Catherine’s children.

5 CDs. I read this after seeing the wonderful filmed version of National Theatre of London’s War Horse, also by Michael Morpurgo. Tommo is in the trenches in Belgium in WWI, recalling his boyhood in the village of Iddesleigh, Devon (where the author has lived since the 1970s). Highlights the issue of the 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers who were executed for crimes such as desertion and cowardice, often without fair trial. In 2006, Britain finally pardoned these men, removing the stain of dishonor. Perhaps this book helped to achieve that.

I got this at a library book sale, and read it prior to sending it to my niece’s daughter for Christmas. Hannah is an aspiring writer. Bob has read some of her writing, which he says is set in the early 20^th century, as is this book. The author built this fictional story around her husband’s grandfather’s experiences as a doctor.

Books Sampled

2 CDs. A BBC Radio full-cast dramatization (2.5 hours) made in the late 1970s and starring Ian Carmichael and Sarah Badel. Not that I’ve read any of the earlier books, but this was the fourth and last Lord Peter Wimsey novel that featured Harriet Vane. Lord Peter finally won Harriet’s heart and they have gotten married. Sayers called this book "A love story with detective interruptions." This dramatization (though wonderful in its own right) left out a lot of the love story, so now I am keen to read the actual book.

1 CD. This is a small sample from the more than 10,000 interviews recorded in the StoryCorps project. I always enjoy hearing these short pieces.

Abridged to 4 cassettes. Loved this. Libraries are now giving away books on cassette, as there are so few of us who still have a cassette player. (I know that my 2005 Prius will no doubt be my last car with both cassette player and CD player.) I might not have picked this up had I known it was abridged. But, it was so wonderfully read by Polly Holliday that I’m glad I didn’t know. This is Gibbons’ first time to try her hand at an historical novel. Set before and during the Civil War, at Seven Oaks in Virginia (Emma Garnet’s childhood home), and then Raleigh, NC.

8 CDs. Cheryl Strayed began writing the ‘Dear Sugar’ online advice column for The Rumpus when a friend who had been writing it no longer wanted to do it. Cheryl had just sent off the first draft of her memoir manuscript (Wild) to her publisher, and decided to try writing the column. I’m glad she collected these columns, as I never would have read them otherwise. She gives the kind of advice one hopes people get—but I doubt they do get—in therapy. She often connects the person’s problem to some lesson she learned in her life, she’s straight with them, and gives sound advice.

Book-related quotes, and quotes from books

I like inconclusive endings a lot. The first YA novel I wrote apparently had an inconclusive ending because I keep getting letters from eighth graders saying they loved my book until the end. It never occurred to me when I was in eighth grade to write a complaining letter to an author. Apparently it’s O.K. now.

- Francine Prose in a recent Boston Globe interview

I try to avoid the word “genre” altogether. A good book is a good book.

- Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl

In 1868, the first typewriter was patented by Christopher Latham Sholes. It only had capital letters and it took up as much room as a large table. Typewriters were slow sellers at first, but Mark Twain bought one almost as soon as they came out, and in 1883 Twain sent the manuscript of his book Life on the Mississippi (1883) to his publisher in typed form, the first author ever to do so.

- The Writer’s Almanac for June 23, 2014

We were gloriously happy as a family and that makes the loss even more devastating…It is intolerable, but to feel intolerable pain is worthy of what I lost. That’s the way I look at it. They deserve that, that I feel every bit of their loss. It’s actually very enriching in that it opens you to joy and it keeps you alight.

- Sonali Deraniyagala, interviewed by Smriti Daniel in Sunday Times, Sri Lanka, May 12, 2013

As the daughter of a psychologist, I can tell you that the thing ostensibly being studied is never the thing being studied.

- Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

NPR has an occasional series called “buttonhole books,” defined as books you “urge passionately on friends, colleagues and passersby.” I like that.

Can You Teach Someone to Write?

On the Beat of Truth

Maxine Childress Brown is a 19^th Ward neighbor and former City Council member. She says her deaf mother (who lived with Maxine and her family the last 20 years of her life) was a born storyteller. Some of that gift must have rubbed off on Maxine. After her mother’s death, she signed up for a memoir writing class at Writers & Books (with Finvola “Fin” Drury, whom Maxine credits with the “capacity to see what we could not see”). Maxine is surely one of Fin’s success stories, as the memoir she began in that class was published (by Gallaudet University Press).

Reading and Writing

Dear Life

For the first time, Munro writes about her childhood, in the collection's final four pieces, which she describes as "not quite stories.... I believe they are the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life."

The Endless Steppe

I was 11 years old. I must have read it four or five times over a few months, and each time deepened my desire to explore and understand the many worlds I now knew were waiting beyond my own.

- from a piece “Used Books that Changed Our Lives” in Utne Reader

Whole Earth Catalog (accolades)

It was like being given permission to invent your own life. That was what the Catalog did. It was called 'access to tools' and it gave you tools to create your own education, your own business, your own life."

- from an article in The Observer May 4, 2013, celebrating the 45th anniversary of WEC

The Whole Earth Catalog inspired the Homebrew Computing Club, which inspired Steve Wozniak to build the Apple 2, which inspired the personal computer movement, which in turn inspired the original web. Which inspired the open-source software movement. Which inspired the open-source hardware movement, which inspired the maker movement, which inspired me.

- Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired

Reviews and Commentary

Dear Life

In every story, there is a slow revelation that changes everything we thought we understood about the characters. Verdict: Read this collection and cherish it for dear life.

- Library Journal, 2012

The Wave

Readers who are looking for a neat story of loss and redemption, a simple narrative arc, catharsis on the cheap, will find no such thing here: the particularity of Deraniyagala’s suffering, and the intensity with which she feels it, is immense. But something does shift in the course of the narrative. As Deraniyagala said in a recent interview, she found that “Writing is a much better quality of agony than trying to forget.” In accurately describing her family’s life—and I’m drawn here to the root word “cura,” care, from which we get “accurate”—she rescues her family from uncaring, careless fate. Losing them plunged her into darkness. Writing about what happened brings them back into the light, a little.

- Teju Cole, from "A Better Quality of Agony," a short review of The Wave, March 27, 2013, The New Yorker

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

The best she [the book’s narrator, Rosemary Cooke] can do is survive a friendless childhood and head off to the University of California, Davis, to put half a continent between herself and her reputation. There she finds dorm-mates lobbing stories in an incessant contest of “whose family is the weirdest,” a game Rosemary deeply wishes she hadn’t won by a mile. She learns to keep her mouth shut. … Technically, the novel begins here: in the middle, as her father advised.

- Barbara Kingsolver, Sunday Book Review, The New York Times, June 6, 2013

Postscripts

The Endless Steppe

Esther Hautzig, 79, whose memoir of growing up in exile in Siberia, The Endless Steppe, has become a classic of children's literature, died Nov. 1 at a New York City hospital. She had Alzheimer's disease. … [She] came to the United States on her own in 1947, meeting Viennese concert pianist Walter Hautzig on the ship across the Atlantic. She completed high school in Brooklyn, N.Y., and attended New York's Hunter College before marrying Hautzig in 1950. Her husband, who taught for many years at Baltimore's Peabody conservatory, survives, along with two children and three grandchildren.

- Obituary in The Washington Post, Nov 8, 2009

On the Beat of Truth

This book brought back to my mind Bob’s Aunt Edith’s self-published memoir of her childhood. Edith’s account left many questions in the reader’s mind, and I sent her a list of all my questions. She was kind enough to answer all, and I have kept the answers with the book, my own personal postscript.

Postscript for Maxine’s book: The book ended with the untimely death of her father at age 55. When I saw Maxine at our House Tour in October (she and James had their house on the tour), I asked her what her mother did after that. I learned that she stayed in her house and supported herself with a job as a clerk/typist. When she was in her early 70s, an intruder entered her house in broad daylight through an open window, beat her severely, and stole her purse. That is the point at which she left DC and came to live with Maxine and James.

Part of a Long Story

A Golden Age

In 1997, author Anam completed her undergraduate education at Mount Holyoke College. She earned a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University in 2004, for her thesis "Fixing the Past: War, Violence, and Habitations of Memory in Post-Independence Bangladesh."

Born Standing Up

This was not in the book, but I was interested to learn that “At age 67, Martin became a father for the first time when [Anne] Stringfield (a writer and former staffer for The New Yorker; they married in 2007) gave birth in December 2012.”