Season’s Readings: Eva's 2023 Selected Book List. Fiction first, but otherwise unordered. Dec. 6, 2023

1. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan ©2021. A novella set at Christmastime, 1985 in Ireland. The protagonist, Bill, father of daughters, was born in 1946. His 16 yr old mother escaped the Magdalene Laundry system because her Protestant employer took her to the hospital, brought her and the infant home, and life went on as before, but with a child in the house. Bill always wondered who his father was. Bill became aware of abuse in the local Magdalene Laundry (Last one closed in 1996).

2. Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout ©2022. 288 pp. My book group discussed this. Lucy & her ex-husband William (father of their two married daughters), 70-ish, leave NYC in March 2020 to escape the pandemic. They rent a house on the Maine coast. The name Trump never appears in the novel, but how his base feels is described. Lucy’s sad childhood colors her adult life.

3. Lessons by Ian McEwan ©2022. 431pp. Follows Roland Baines, Englishman, born 1948. The Cuban Missile crisis, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, Brexit, and the pandemic all touch Roland’s life. There’s a case of child abuse of a boarding school boy by a woman teacher. Roland’s wife abandons her family to devote herself to her art, so Roland is a single parent.

5. Whisper Hollow by Chris Cander (a woman) ©2015 380pp. Like Demon Copperhead, brings a range of Appalachian people to life. Set in a West Virginia coal mining town between 1916 and 1979, so several generations are born. One of the characters, Myrthen, is afflicted with a mixed-up sense of religion. Alta loves John, but marries Walter. There’s a mine accident

6. Count the Ways by Joyce Maynard ©2021. 441 pp. Eleanor loves to draw. In her late teens she sold a children’s book which turned into a popular series. In her early 20s she bought a 40 acre farm in NH. At a crafts fair she met Cam, a woodworker. They married, had 3 children, and lived an idyllic life for a few years. When her book sales dropped off, there was a lean stretch, until Eleanor developed a syndicated comic strip about their family life. Cam was the fun parent, she the responsible one. Then their son Toby had a tragic accident, and Cam had an affair with the babysitter. The book opens with the 21^st century wedding of one of their children (Alison is now Al), and Toby is best man, so we got a preview of how things are going to develop.

7. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck ©1945. 5 CDs. I could tell from the opening paragraph that the writing was going to be extraordinary. MaryDan and I walked around Cannery Row last summer. I watched the movie too, but the book is better.

8. Olga by Bernhard Schlink, translated from the German by Charlotte Collins ©2018. 273 pp. Schlink was born in 1944 when Ferdinand, the narrator, was born. Olga was born poor in Prussia in the late 1880s and died at 90+. She pulled herself up to become a teacher until she was fired during the Nazi period, and an illness left her deaf. From age 53 she supported herself as a custom seamstress. She developed a close relationship with Ferdinand, child of one of her clients. In the 21^st century, Ferdinand recovers old letters from Olga to Herbert, the great love of her life. He had wanderlust. This is an unsentimental love story. There are little mysteries beautifully resolved by the end. It touches on German history in the lifespans of Olga and Ferdinand.

9. Women Talking by Miriam Toews ©2018. 5 CDs, read by Matthew W. Edison. There was more to the conversations in the book than in the movie. I learned more about August, all of which reinforced the rightness of the casting of Ben Wishaw in the film. The men of the neighboring Mennonite community have been forbidden to marry within their own group because of a rash of birth defects. So the men of that colony have a vested interest in not letting the women of the neighboring colony get away.

10. The Personal Librarian. Historical novel by Marie Benedict & Victoria Murray ©2021. 10 CDs read by Robin Miles. Belle Greener (1879-1950) was born in D.C. to the black bourgeoisie. Her father was the first black graduate of Harvard. During Reconstruction he was a professor. The tide turned. The family moved to NYC. Her mother said “We lost the battle,” so asserted they were “white” in the 1906 census, with surname “da Costa Greene,” of Portuguese descent. Belle’s father, proud of his race and a Civil Rights activist, left the family. Belle’s sisters were schoolteachers. Belle became librarian of J.P. Morgan’s collection. He sent her to auctions, and to Europe to collect rare manuscripts. These are facts. The authors have to imagine the stresses of “passing.” Belle had an affair with Bernard Berenson who was himself ignoring the rumor that he was Jewish by birth. (He was.)

11. The Newcomers: finding refuge, friendship, and hope in an American classroom by Helen Thorpe ©2018. read by Kate Handford in 15 hours. Journalist Helen Thorpe embedded herself in Denver South High School for a year and a half, during which Trump was elected. She follows 22 students 14-19, zeroing in on several families. In the summer Thorpe took a trip to the refugee camp in Uganda where Methuselah and Solomon’s family had lived for years. Mr. Williams was a great English Language Acquisition teacher. Describes the challenges of legal asylum immigrants. They initially take any job they can get.

12. Bad Blood by Lorna Sage (1943-2001) ©2000. 281 pp. In 2001 Lorna’s only child, Sharon, accepted the Whitbread Prize for this memoir on Lorna’s behalf. One of the dimensions for me was parallels with PL, who was born 3 months before Lorna. Lorna’s grandfather was a philandering vicar. Lorna’s grandmother was not a happy camper. Until Lorna was 4, her father was away so she and her mother lived in the vicarage. In an interview Sharon mentioned that Lorna’s second husband was 14 years younger than Lorna. OK, that & lifespan are parallel with PL’s mother. Lorna grew up in Shropshire, on the Welsh border.

13. Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son by Adam Hochschild (1942- ) ©1986. 198pp. Adam’s family summered at “The Eagle’s Nest,” their estate in the Adirondacks. Exuberant Uncle Boris was a WWI ace pilot. Adam’s mother was loving. She conducted shuttle diplomacy between father and son. Father-son relations improved in Adam’s adulthood. Adam became a writer. I read a few of his narrative non-fiction books, & also Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. (Good!) by Arlie Hochschild ©2016. 11 hrs. Arlie is Adam’s wife. She lived in rural Louisiana for a year.

14. Better Living through Birding by Christian Cooper (1963- ) ©2023. 282 pp. The author became famous as the Central Park Birder when a video went viral on the same day as George Floyd’s death. This is a memoir that covers so much more. Cooper came out as gay during his freshman year at Harvard. He recounts how painful being in the closet the 12 years before that was. He compares the closet to “passing.” I loved reading about his dream job as a writer for Marvel Comics, and his collaboration with the “pencilers” and the “inkers.” He writes engagingly about birding, his travels, his family relationships, and his life-style.

15. The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp by Simon Parkin ©2022. 341 pp. One of the NYer’s “Best Books of 2022.” Parkin follows a particular internee, Peter Fleischmann who was 18 in 1940. He had been just young enough in 1938 after Kristallnacht to qualify for transport to Britain from his boarding school for Jewish orphans. The book focuses on Hutchinson Men’s Camp on the Isle of Man. Many anti-Nazi foreigners were interned. Over the months & years they petitioned for their release and, after due process, some were freed. The men were housed in requisitioned holiday seaside row houses. Right away they identified each other’s strengths and made the best of their plight. They started a newspaper, a café, a lecture series, & organized concerts, plays and art shows. The men could take hikes around the island and swim, under guard. There was an archeology crew that marched to a dig under guard. All this mitigated depression; however there were some suicides. Peter was mentored by several established artists. They mixed paints from raw materials like red brick dust and sardine oil. They used floor linoleum for lino cuts. An outside Quaker woman, Bertha Bracey, was instrumental in improving conditions in the camp. Some suspense is introduced by Parkin’s research on inmate Ludwig Werschauer. Many of the inmates thought that if Werschauer were not Jewish he would have been a Nazi. MI5 suspected Werschauer of being a spy. But he started a technical school within the Camp, so Captain Daniel supported him. Photo plates.

16. Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football by John Urschel and Laura Thomas (his wife). ©2019. 230 pp. A gift from Phil Tracy. The ideal reader is probably a high school kid interested in math or football, but I appreciated it. I’m interested in how someone gets interested in math, and, because my father played college football, I was interested in John’s account of his years at Penn State—he loved it. I read about John Urschel afterwards in Wikipedia. He played in the NFL for 3 years and holds a Ph.D in combinatorial math from M.I.T. His white ex-surgeon father and black lawyer mother divorced when he was only 3, but he did regularly see his Dad after his father moved to Buffalo NY in John’s high school years at Canisius Jesuit H.S.

17. Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman by Abbey Chava Stein ©2019 244 pp. The author, born in 1991, in Hassidic Brooklyn, was his parents’ first son, after 5 girls. Seven more children followed. The author did not speak English until age 20, and had no access to secular media. The child never heard gender discussed. Yet he felt even as a toddler that he had the soul of a girl. His education was intensely religious. Secular subjects, even English and math, were almost totally neglected. He went to boarding school in the Catskills after being expelled from his Yeshiva in Williamsburg. That’s most of the book. The author was married at 19 (arranged), had a son at 20, left Hassidism at 21, found community outside Hassidism, and matriculated to Columbia University. She came out as a female named Abby Chava Stein at 24. I went to www.abbychavastein.com to find out what happened since. She is making a living as a writer and speaker. I enjoyed her YouTube tour of Williamsburg. I like her! She looks good, and she seems centered. A confidential 4 of her 12 sibs are in touch.

18. A Fine Old Conflict by Jessica Mitford (1917-1996) ©1977. 320pp. In an old 1980’s letter (I’m SLOWLY emptying my attic), my mother mentioned she was reading this and finding J.M. “so funny,” so I requested it from the library. Thanks, Mom. I try not to read just books published recently. The title comes from the author’s childhood mis-hearing of the sung words “final conflict” in “The Internationale.” She and lawyer husband Bob Treuhaft left the Communist Party in 1958, with no regrets about their years in it. It was a pleasure reading about their good marriage. Jessica was active in Civil Rights. Told by a white Southerner that "It don't seem possible" that school integration could work, Jessica Mitford icily replied, "To me it do!"

19. There Is Nothing For You Here by Fiona Hill ©2021, read by the author. 12 CDs. Fiona grew up in County Durham, England. She is a coal miner’s daughter, but by the time Fiona was born in 1965 he was a hospital porter because his mine had been shut down. As we learned in the 2019 impeachment hearing, when we met Fiona, a subpoenaed fact witness, she is an expert on Russia & Ukraine, now an American citizen. In Russia in the 1990’s she witnessed large regions suddenly become abandoned. Her husband’s family has roots in North Dakota. She came to recognize whole regions of America as forgotten also. The people in these regions voted for Trump, as County Durham had voted for Brexit, and Russians had allowed Putin to take control.

20. The Escape Artist, the man who broke out of Auschwitz to warn the world by Jonathan Freedland ©2022. 313 pp. A biography of Rudolph Vrba né Walter Rosenberg starting in childhood. Photo plates. The details of the escape were new to me. (If Walter could walk 8 miles in pitch darkness over mountains soaked and cold, carrying heavy boots because he could not get his swollen feet into them, surely I can walk a few thousand steps leaning on a rollator, well shod, well fed, and well rested.) Had the warning been promulgated immediately and more widely, Walter felt thousands more might have lived. He was bitter. But he got a Ph.D in Chemistry in 1951, had two marriages, and two daughters, and lived to age 82, in Slovakia, England, Israel, and Canada.

Full disclosure: I am proud to say I personally know each of the next two authors:

21. Up Home Again by Ellie O’Leary ©2023. 138pp. I went to the book launch. I had read some of this memoir in manuscript form a few years ago, but a lot of it was new to me. I remained rapt even during the parts where I generally knew the gist. The book focuses on 2004-2008 (with excursions outside those years), when Ellie moved back to Maine at a low point. She valiantly took steps to improve her life. When all her efforts seemingly bore no fruit, she despaired. But a friend showed up. I could relate to the workplace angst, such as realizing a job is no longer a fit. But then Ellie discovered poetry. She got published! By 2020, she’s in a much better place: grandchildren, travel, teaching, homeowner, Poet Laureate of Amesbury. Available on Amazon.

22. Long John by Anne Gunshenan & Helen Gillcrist. ©2022. 196pp. A memorial book about my first cousin John Anthony Gillcrist (1922-1988) by his daughter Helen and sister Anne. Included is an interview by a nephew, in which John talks about growing up in the Depression. We learn how John got into Annapolis by impressing a Congressman from W. VA and establishing residency there. As a young naval officer he met his wife Rammy, also a naval officer. John spent his career in the Navy. I read some of Long John to our cousin Anne Guinan during a visit to Adrian with MaryDan.. Available on Amazon.