Eva's 2011 Selected Book List.  Order is not significant, but  non-fiction is grouped before fiction.

 

1.       An Unfinished Marriage by Joan Anderson 231pp (Large Print).  The previous year  the author  had opted not to follow her husband to his new job. Instead she lived alone in their summer cottage on the Cape. Now he has decided to take early retirement and join her, but he is at a loss without work.  He’d assumed he’d  land a local job. He gets depressed, then rejuvenated. She breaks an ankle.  They learn they are going to be grandparents.  They have a dinner party.  While their house is being renovated they live for two weeks in a primitive shack near Provincetown.  Herman enjoyed the pages I read aloud to him.

2.       My Father and Myself  by J.R. Ackerley © 1968, 283 pp. Famous first sentence: “I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919.”     Ackerley’s father was a self-made fruit importer nicknamed “The banana king”  who was supportive of his son.  He had a don’t ask don’t tell philosophy, “It’s all right, old boy.  I prefer not to know. So long as you enjoyed yourself, that’s the main thing.”   When he died he left his son a letter revealing that for 20 years he’d maintained  a second family a few blocks away from their family home. Ackerley’s obsessive curiosity  tries to unravel the mystery of his father’s early life as a handsome young Horse Guard who received the financial favors that got him started in life from the flamboyant Count de Gallatin.

3.       Ackerley, A Life of J.R. Ackerley  by Peter Parker. © 1989. 435 pp.  Photo plates.  I got this on inter-library loan after reading a great review in The NYer  by Joan Acocella.  Ackerley’s day job was  literary editor for the BBC’s The Listener.  Today he is remembered for three memoirs and a novel, the most famous of which is My Dog Tulip.  Nice turn of phrase from Parker: “Illegitimacy was still considered something of a blot upon a ducal escutcheon”   Ackerley’s lifelong quest was for the ideal friend.  He never found him. But he did have friends. E.M. Forster, 17 years his senior,  was one.  He had affairs and one night stands too.

4.       Madame Secretary, a Memoir by Madeleine Albright. I enjoyed reading about Madeleine’s  family, childhood, education, career. marriage, learning of her Jewish grandparents while in the spotlight. politics, humor… photo plates. I highly recommend this book.

5.       When the Music Stopped, Discovering My Mother by Thomas J. Cottle (1937- ) © 2004, 269 pp.  The author was born and raised in Chicago near Lincoln Park. . His mother (neé Gertrude Weinstock) was born in 1904 into a large poor family of Russian immigrant Jews on the West Side of Chicago.  She was wrenched away from her family to study piano in NYC at age 13. It is her son’s contention, and he is a professor of psychiatry, that this damaged her.  From ages 19 to 37 she had a brilliant career as  a concert pianist (stage name Gitta Gradova), often on the road.  She gave  up her career for her family.  Her son says that she should not have, or at least that she should have resumed her career after her kids were grown.  Gitta suffered from depression,as does her son. The two had  horrible arguments. The author’s father, b. 1898,  was a physician who played chamber music every weekend in their home with his friends. Tommy went to wonderful private schools. They had a summer cottage on Lake Michigan.   I loved the accounts of all the musical luminaries who visited their home, the photo plates,  and generally the account of a Chicago family contemporary with my own relatives but so different.  There was too much psychological analysis, and  way too many reviews of Gitta’s concerts—all but one belonged in an appendix.   The author is pedantic, quoting others too much. Just skip those parts.

6.       Strength in What Remains  by Tracy Kidder. © 2010, 272 pp. The story of an immigrant from Burundi, Deogratias (Deo).  I learned a lot about the genocide in Burundi and Rwanda, and the refugee experience. Deo is a sometime medical student, a Tutsi, and an affiliate of Partners in Health. Paul Farmer is a hero of Deo’s.  Deo has build a clinic in Burundi. An old Hutu who’d been fighting the ethnic cleansing wars since 1965 said he wished he’d spent his life doing something positive like Deo.  An ex-nun, Sharon, and a generous childless older couple, Nancy and Charlie, helped Deo when he was homeless in NYC.

7.       Nothing to Envy, Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Remick © 2009. 10 CDs. The author is the Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. She was a reporter in South Korea during the years she wrote this book, which consists of in-depth interviews with six defectors, about their lives in the decade of the 1990’s, and life since defection in the oughts, a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-Sung, the unchallenged rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il, and a famine that killed one fifth of the population. Next to North Korea, China looks like a bastion of liberality and  prosperity.   All the interviewees escaped via China.  One of them is a woman pediatrician who was idealistic and patriotic, but she had no medicine or supplies, and worse, no food, to help her patients in North Korea. She had to start at the bottom again in South Korea. Then there was a pair of young lovers who escaped separately, it being too dangerous to communicate their plans even to each other, not even of safe arrival in South Korea. The one was married with child by the time the other, who the first thought she’d never see or be in touch with again,  arrived.  Mrs. Sung was totally dedicated to her country until the famine forced her to compromise her ideals to survive.  Her rebellious daughter, who’d already defected, cajoled her to leave.  A teenaged orphan, a petty criminal, had already served time in the North Korean gulag was another interviewee.  The place is Orwellian, a nightmare.

8.       Lucky Girl by Mei-Ling Hopgood (1973- ). © 2009. 244pp. Memoir of an adoptee who found her birth family. She’d always assumed she came from a very poor Taiwanese farming family.  In fact, by the time she found them, they were middle class and glad to hear she’d had a fortunate life too, in Michigan. They had eight daughters and had tried to give away the last three, succeeding with two. The other adoptee went to Switzerland. Mei-Ling found her too, Irene Hoffman.  There were multiple visits among Switzerland, Taiwan, and the U.S. so she developed real relationships with her  sisters.   All already knew some English. Mei-Ling studied Mandarin.  Her sisters interpreted when she talked with Ba and Ma. There were deep dark secrets.   The family was originally from Quemoy (aka Kinmen). The Hopgoods also adopted two boys from Korea.

9.       Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell., © 2011,  7 CDs.  A casual history of Hawaii from the missionaries’ arrival in 1820 to the annexation by the US in 1898. Not scholarly, but neither is it dry. On the contrary!   I like Vowell’s glib and breezy style.  Tidbit: Once regular shipping from California started there were more deaths from disease among the non-immune natives.   It seems when the missionaries came all the way from Boston around Cape Horn there was enough time for measles and such to pass beyond their communicable stages before arrival.   I liked this so much I picked up another Vowell at the library.

10.    A Covert Affair, the Adventures of Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS by Janet Conant. © 2011, 12 CDs..  Actually a lot of it is about a colleague of theirs in the OSS, and later fellow ex-pat in Paris, Jane Foster, who really got into hot water in the McCarthy era.  Herman and I enjoyed  this on the way to Rochester at Thanksgiving.  My Life in France  by Julia herself is better.

11.    About Alice by Calvin Trillin  © 2006,  78pp.  I’d read the gist of this in a long NYer article a few years ago, but it was a pleasure immersing myself again  in this real life love affair. Alice Stewart Trilling (1938-2001) RIP.  I liked the cover photo.

12.    Messages from my Father  by Calvin Trillin. © 1996, 117pp I revisited this too. A  portrait of the Kansas City grocer and later businessman in Calvin’s low-key, self-deprecating, slightly repetitive style. Abe Trillin (1907-1967) RIP.   

13.    Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America by Thomas L. Friedman. . © 2008. 17 CDs, which I listened to on an iPod walking to and from work. Preaching to the converted, but I did get new thoughts. Elks ate Aspen seedlings.  Wolves were re-introduced to Yellowstone, which ended that problem.  In winter a wolf eats one elk/month. But there are so many more elks than wolves that can’t account for the Aspen recovery. Hypothesis: elks are now afraid to feed in the thickets where wolves might lurk.  We desperately need systemic changes which will require leadership. In the meantime the pep talk of this book reminds individuals like me to reduce their personal carbon footprints. One of Friedman’s theses is  $10/barrel oil brought down the Soviet Union, not Ronald Reagan.  $100/barrel oil shores up petrodictatorships. 

14.    The Big Thirst: The Future of Water  by Charles Fishman, © 2011, 11 CDs. Right up there with Hot, Flat and Crowded about why we need conservation and a new attitude towards utilities we’ve been taking for granted. Packed with  ideas and facts new to me. Patricia Mulroy, Las Vegas’s water commissioner, is a leader in systemic water conservation, but she’s running into diminishing returns. Australia has some big  challenges. The author takes us to  India.  Atlanta GA had a water crisis.

15.    Freewheeling Through Ireland  by Edward Enfield, © 2006, 6 cassettes. The author, an Englishman, is over 60 when he undertakes two cycling trips in the West of Ireland.  He stays in Bed & Breakfasts. He’s a good writer.

16.    Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin (aka Hauser), 10 CDs.  A historical novel about Alice Liddell Hargreaves (1852-1934), Charles Dobson’s muse, covering the whole span of her life. The author takes the scant facts I read on Wikapedia and runs with them.  She captures the edgy dance between a borderline pedophile and the precocious child with whom he is captivated.

17.    Loving Frank by Nancy Horan, © 2007.  A novel based on the scant historical info on Mamah Bothwick Cheney & Frank Lloyd Wright’s scandalous love affair. Both were married with children, but they ran off to Europe together in 1909. The book  realistically imagines the difficulties of  loving Frank. The end came as a shock to me. I guess I never read a biography of FLW.

18.    Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand  by Helen Simonson © 2010, 358 pp.  Major Pettigrew is a very conservative 68 year old widower who falls in love with Mrs. Ali, a widow of 58 who runs the local shop. His son Roger is a financier in London obsessed with his career. Roger has an American fiancée, Sandy, who grew on me.  Major Pettigrew’s rescue of the damsel in distress and their night in the fishing cabin in Wales was a successful  love scene. Amusing line: The major has been shot in the leg, and some buckshot grazed his crotch. He tells Roger that he’s going to propose to Jasmine. Roger says, “Your testicle is still in traction.”  

19.    In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar, © 2006. 246 pp.  Novel set in Tripoli, Libya in 1979, with an afterward in 1994. The narrator is the 24 yr old Suleiman remembering the 9 year old Suleiman. There’s a flashback to his mother in 1970.  She held hands with a boy and was married off. I had not realized what a hellish country Libya was. Telephones tapped, political opponents tortured and publicly hanged as traitors.  The dark side of childhood, and the dark side of life in Libya.   A book group selection.         

20.    Driftless by David Rhodes © 2008 429pp.  Marie identified this as perhaps the best book she read in 2010, commenting that it “really nailed Wisconsin folk.”  The author went beyond the 3 or 4 plots that supposedly are reworked in every novel.   I loved it when Wade, carrying Olivia to the bathroom, said “Get used to it, motherfuckers” to some starers, and he and Olivia laughed uproariously the rest of the way to the john. That thing where Olivia could walk, but had not told Violet yet, and now it was awkward—I had not seen that treated in literature before. Winifred’s pastoral career, July Montgomery, the Amish,  …Bravo!

21.    Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. © 2009, 667pp. The author grew up in Ethiopia of Indian parents and he emigrated to the U.S., so he knows that of which he writes. A few years ago I read and loved Verghese’s memoir My Own Country, a Doctor’s  Story, and after reading the novel I read several articles by Verghese in the New Yorker (I have all NYers to 2005 on DVDs).This novel puts his philosophy of hands-on medicine into situations. I was engrossed. I loved Hemi and Ghosh. Having said this, I did not enjoy the character Genet. She was unattractive on the inside. I would think the incest taboo should have kicked in.  

22.    Mudbound by Hillary Jordan © 2008. 416 pp in large print. Most of the drama took place in 1946 in the Mississippi Delta, on a farm.  Henry, the owner, is fair-minded for the times but has a long way to go from our post-civil-rights-movement-perspective.  Hap and Florence, the tenant farmers, are strong characters. The ending put the best possible spin on Ronsel’s diminished prospects, while couching them only in hope. Thanks to Art recommending it during our discussion, I got The Warmpth of Many Suns by Isabel Wilkerson via interlibrary loan.  It’s history-by-in-depth-interview (shades of  Nothing to Envy) of the migration of 6 million blacks Northward 1917-1970.  I could not renew it because someone else was waiting for it.  Stay tuned.

23.    Brooklyn by Colm Toibin © 2009, 262 pp.  Eilis, about 19,  has an admirable 30-yr-old sister, Rose. The novel is bookended by a few weeks in Ireland—just before Eilis emigrated to Brooklyn, and Eilis’s first visit home after Rose’s untimely death.  Eilis matures during the course of the novel, though she backslides with Jim Farrell. A theme running all through the book is failure to communicate.  The scenes on the boat over were memorable.  I liked Tony’s approach to courtship, and his family generally.

24.    The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman  by Washington Irving. © 1820 1 cassette. Read by Ed Begley. A long short story. Schoolmaster Crane and Brom Bones both hope to win the hand of Katrina Van Tassel. Crane is superstitious and knows Cotton Mather’s book on the witch trials well.  A lot of New York State Hudson River atmosphere.

25.    Tender Is The Night by F.Scott Fitzgerald © 1934 by F. Scott Fitzgerald. 12 CDs. I t starts circa 1924 as one big party scene among the ex-pats on the Riviera, but wait, there’s some mystery about Nicole. The Diver’s seeming perfect marriage has a dark side  In fact they end up getting divorced. She’s got a history of mental illness, Dick’s unfaithful and an alcoholic.