Category: reading

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Reading the Sunday papers

Some days the news gives you news in unintended ways. In today’s New York Times I read the obituary of a poet named Abraham Sutzkever, whose beautiful, haunting, and heart-breaking work I discovered only recently. He wrote in Yiddish about the Holocaust and the lost world of Eastern European Jewry.

Here is one of his poems, translated by Jacqueline Osherow:

Written on a slat of a railway car:

If some time someone should find pearls
threaded on a blood-red string of silk
which, near the throat, runs all the thinner
like life’s own path until it’s gone
somewhere in a fog and can’t be seen —

If someone should find these pearls
let him know how — cool, aloof — they lit up
the eighteen-year-old, impatient heart
of the Paris dancing girl, Marie.

Now, dragged through unknown Poland —
I’m throwing my pearls through the grate.

If they’re found by a young man —
let these pearls adorn his girlfriend.
If they’re found by a girl —
let her wear them; they belong to her.
And if they’re found by an old man —
let him, for these pearls, recite a prayer.

From Epitaphs 1943-44

When I turned from the Times’ news section to “News of the Week in Review,” I saw its lead story about political anger. It was illustrated with some of the most disturbing photographs I’ve seen in a long time. The front page photo is from a Tea Party rally. Pictured front and center are three women not far off my age cohort. One holds a sign that reads, “Gun Control is being able to hit your target.” The jump has a photo, too, this one from the 1964 presidential campaign. A woman identified as a Barry Goldwater supporter holds a “USA Love It or Leave It” poster. Her face is so contorted with anger that she looks more animal than human. (For some reason, the editors have selected women’s faces here. Food for thought. No comment.)

Left me thinking about hate in its various historical moments and incarnations and what it does to us.

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Books given and stolen

I always make sure to have plenty of books when I’m going on a trip–ones I know I’ll like and ones I take in case I don’t like others and ones I take in case I’m not in the mood to read even the ones I know I’ll like. So when I left on our family vacation, I had a good supply. I didn’t need another book. But…

…we passed a bookstore and Jenny and Nate ran in because they wanted to buy me a book. It was “The Book Thief.” They said it was a YA, but that they thought I’d like it. Jenny, Nate’s mother, was listening to an audio version. Nate, who is 14, read it a couple of years ago and considers it one of his favorites. He is currently reading ”To Kill a Mockingbird” and that’s already another favorite. Because of who he is, I know he has a lifetime ahead of him of reading books he will love.

I started it as soon as we got back to the house. A little strange at the beginning. The narrator was Death. There were some graphic elements, which I am never charmed by. But once the story really got going, I couldn’t put it down. The book is over 500 pages and when I finished it the next afternoon I cried. A lot.

The author, Markus Zusak, includes a lot of visual imagery in his unusual use of language. And I liked that the book’s familiar subject, the Holocaust, was viewed from a much less familiar perspective: the main character is a young German girl living with her German foster parents among their neighbors in a small town not far from the concentration camp at Dachau. The girl is the “book thief” who has a passion for books even before she can read and collects them whenever and however she can. As you might expect in a book narrated by Death–or, I guess, any decent book–the people run the basic human gamut, monsters to heroes, with most occupying the flawed and complicated middle ground.

And what a fascinating character Death is as Zusak has imagined him. He’s not an enemy. He’s pretty much just following orders, too. He goes where he needs to be and even seems to have a heart that breaks occasionally at what he’s called on to do. The souls he must carry away he bears softly, often tenderly, even sadly. He is nothing to be afraid of. He is just the natural consequence of what happens.

A gift carefully chosen is always a treat. But when someone gives you a book they have read and loved, it carries an extra dimension. The giving of a treasure from one book-lover to another is a gift of time well-spent and ideas lovingly offered. What could be better?

Thank you, Jenny and Nate.

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A tale of two endings

First of all, I had a “Wuthering Heights” problem just because I had never read it. No, really, never read it, I have to confess, though I had read and reread its cousin, “Jane Eyre,” many times. My friend Susan and I had coincidentally just finished rereading “Middlemarch” and were thinking about reading something else together.

“’Wuthering Heights’,” I said. “I hate “’Wuthering Heights’,” she said. But, being the person she is, she agreed to go along with me. Now I know what she meant.

I had not gone far into the fresh hell that is Emily Bronte’s great work when I noticed that I hated, if not the book itself, then every character. Ok, not Lockwood. Lockwood’s not really a hate-able character.

So for the past week my bookmark has remained at a page just short of the end. I’m not sure why I am so reluctant to be done with it. That’s more like the way I sometimes am with books I love. Like the one I galloped through while avoiding Heathcliff, et. al.–“Persuasion,” Jane Austen’s final and posthumously-published novel.

It is a particular triumph, don’t you think, to have written a novel that is still a page-turner 193 years later. I recently saw an exhibit of Jane’s letters at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York and was charmed by how closely her snarky comments to her correspondents echoed the ever-so-gently snarky observations of her heroines. Reminded me of Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s comment, “If you have nothing nice to say, then come sit by me!”

I couldn’t put it down. Until I got close enough to the end so that I knew Anne would be reunited with her love (it’s not a spoiler if the book is almost 200 years old, is it?) and her silly sisters would grow a little wiser and all manner of things would be well. Though not so much for Mr. Elliot and Mrs. Clay, whom we despise, right?

But at that point I stopped for a while, trying to stave off the wrenching moment of parting from the wonderful world of Jane. I even considered going back to Heathcliff. But it felt impossible to veer from “Persuasion’s” privately guarded emotional turmoils to the heavy lifting of sturm und drang on the moors. So I finished it and loved every delicious sentence.

In the intro to the edition I read, Margaret Drabble calls “Persuasion” a “novel of second chances” and what’s not to love about that? Especially at this time of year, when we look forward to January’s illusion of a clean slate.

Now I know what’s waiting for me. A hot and cold dose of human flaws and passions. I’ll read it and I’ll be glad I did. I know, I know. I’ll finish “Wuthering Heights” tomorrow.

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New on the Bookshelf: “Americans in Space” by Mary E. Mitchell

Mary E. Mitchell is one of my unseen online friends. We’ve never met in person, although I’m hoping we will, since we are both in the Boston area. But what I know of Mary is her generosity and good humor in taking on the “herding cats” job of organizing a lovely retreat for women writers each spring in Duxbury, and her accomplishments as a writer of well-reviewed novels, including this latest one.

Mary’s new book is “Americans in Space.” Her style has been described as “one party poignancy, one part humor” and, in choosing “Americans in Space” as an Indie Next selection, the reviewer said, ” ‘Americans in Space’ will speak to all readers, especially to parents of teens.”

Mary’s first novel is “Starting Out Sideways,” a 2007 Thomas Dunne Book from St. Martin’s Press. For years she has taught writing at the Joan Brack Adult Learning Center and at Bethany Hill School, a living and learning community, both in Framingham, Massachusetts.

In describing “Americans in Space,” Mary says:

“For months I have been telling readers that “Americans in Space” is about loss, and about the long, excruciating road back from loss for a young widow and her unmoored family. The novel’s main character, Kate Cavanaugh, struggles mightily two years after the death of her beloved husband. She cannot reach Charlotte, her angry teenage daughter, who acts out in cyberspace and in tattoo parlors. She cannot get Hunter, her four year old son, to speak in full sentences, or relinquish the ketchup bottle he carries clutched to his heart. She cannot find happiness, despite the best efforts of resourceful friends, an eager love interest or colleagues at work. Kate is a guidance counselor at the Alan B. Shepard (first American in space!) High School, and runs a weekly counseling group for mixed-up, troubled students. Her group is called New Frontiers. My misfits, Kate lovingly calls them.

“It is the one area of Kate’s life that seems to work, her weekly efforts with these deeply troubled children. Unlike with her own daughter, Kate feels she can bring comfort and meaning to these young people’s lives. They look up to her and trust her and try not to curse when they’re around her. She has a way of making them believe in themselves, even when they’re feeling most self-loathing or unsure. One girl in her group, Phoenix, especially captures Kate’s interest.

‘She looks nothing like my Charlotte,” Kate muses, “yet I often imagine Phoenix to be my daughter’s psychic twin. She is sensitive, intelligent, volatile. If my own daughter were blonde instead of dark, and named for a city instead of for Kyle’s grandmother, Charlotte might be this lovely waif in my office. Except that Charlotte didn’t swallow a whole bottle of ibuprofen last year.’

I think what I realize, only after writing this novel and then seeing it in print, is that Kate has been healing herself all along, through her work with other people’s children. It is the giving of herself to others that finally touches the iceberg within her heart. The warmth and forgiveness she feels for these children begins to allow her to forgive herself and love her children just the way they are. A truth, then, emerges from fiction.

It’s a funny thing to find a lesson in one’s own work. Maybe we are our own best teachers, if only we listen closely enough.”

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You’ve Gotta Read This!

How do readers and books find each other? Here are all these new books coming out every day….old ones you never got the chance to read…eye-catching displays at the bookstore…reviews by reviewers you respect…reviews by people you’ve never heard of…..Decisions, decisions.

Here’s what I think it comes down to: no matter how many interesting reviews you read or how many ads you see, what most often gets a book into my hands is a real person telling me, “You’ve just got to read this.”

That’s exactly the premise behind the Flashlight Worthy book recommendations web site, which has as its mission recommendations of “books so good, they’ll keep you up past your bedtime.” The site’s creators are Peter Steinberg (who handles the books part) and Eric Mueller (the tech part) I love the name, with its image of when staying up to read a good book was a daring act. (Just one more chapter. Pleeeeze.)

Peter explains that he started Flashlight Worthy because finding quick, concise online book recommendations was hard. 

“Amazon reviews are massively long. Google is too robotic, and while I love book bloggers, it’s hard to find one who shares your reading tastes. And if you do, they usually don’t read much faster than you do so you don’t have a whole lot of choice in what they recommend.”

At Flashlight Worthy, readers can add their own “recommended” lists, that are categorized so that it’s easy to find just what you’re looking for, from “testing the waters of sci-fi” to “baseball by the numbers: the best books on baseball stats” to “great books for strong girls in 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade.”

Peter and Eric invite you to visit and add a list of your own. Oh, and one more thing: they have a little problem they’re looking for help with. Seems that the blog’s name tends to confuse Google into grouping them with suppliers of flashlights. So they’re hoping book-lovers will add the site to their own blogrolls to keep the recommendations coming.

Another group of book recommendations–these are for children’s books–comes from my friend Deborah Sloan at her site, The Picnic Basket. Her readers are teachers, librarians, and just plain lovers of children’s literature who post reviews of new books. When I read it, I always find myself making lists of books to give as gifts. One that’s on my list right now is “Buying, Training & Caring for Your Dinosaur” by Laura Rennert, which sounds like fun for my favorite young dinosaur-lovers.

Picnic Basket readers were probably among the first to know about “Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith,” by Deborah Heiligman, a book that’s just been nominated for a National Book Award.

Deborah’s decision to set up a blog for book recommendations underscores my impression that our favorite book choices often come from other readers. Deborah quotes Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, saying, “Nothing influences a person more than a recommendation from a trusted friend.”

What books would you recommend?

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Confessions of a poetry contest judge

I’ve just picked the winner of a poetry book contest. My first time as a judge. And I am feeling good about my choices (yes, choices–there were also honorable mentions) but sad, to paraphrase Robert Frost, that I could not choose more and be one contest judge.

I felt honored to be asked to make this selection. And I felt the loss for the non-winners (let’s not call them losers). True, there were a few books that went pretty quickly into the “not” pile. But the largest stack was “maybe” and here lay the hopes and dreams I felt most keenly. It was hard work and I had more than a few nights of dreams prompted by anxiety about the task and the responsibility.

There’s the worry about objectivity, first of all. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s primarily in the eye of the beholder and the conscience of the judge. I knew many of the authors of these books, and I’m sure that’s often the case in contests. Since these entries were not anonymous, you could easily make a case for some kind of favoritism. But you’d be wrong. I tried scrupulously to make sure I was not giving unfair advantage to poets I knew. Or unfair disadvantage either, for that matter.

And of course, it’s all apples and oranges. The books were all over the place in terms of theme, style, and intent. But I tried to figure out how well each book succeeded in being itself. I wasn’t trying to equate, say a spiritual descendant of “The Bell Jar” with one more in the X. J. Kennedy mode. I was just trying to see which seemed to be most successfully the book it was meant to be.

What I came away with after I was finished was a sense of huge affection and respect for the poets who entered the contest. All poets are putting so much at risk when they put themselves on the page. I once heard a singer and songwriter say, “All my songs are autobiographical; they’re just not about me.” With a poet, it’s just the other way around. Whether or not they’re autobiographical, the writer always shows through.

One of riskiest maneuvers of all is entering a poetry contest because you have to declare to yourself and the person who will read your work that you care very much about this. And that you are trusting the reader to treat your work with respect. You do that with any reader, but with a contest judge the stakes are higher.

So here, finally, is my confession to you authors of the stack of books now just off to the side of my desk. My feelings for you are tender and grateful, respectful of your efforts, admiring of your resolve. You are the ones who follow your dreams, who honor your words, who notice the world and offer it for us to share. Thank you.

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What do you think?

I couldn’t wait to see “Bright Star.” I expected to love it.  After all–Keats, Fanny Brawne, Jane Campion–all the right credentials are in place.  Adoring reviews from everyone from A.O. Scott and David Denby to all my poetry pals.  What’s not to like?

Much to my surprise, I didn’t like it.  I found it leaden and charmless, springing to life only in the brief moments when poetry was discussed, when the little sister spoke, and when the Hampstead Heathens sang in the drawing room. 

So I expressed my opinion. And then I was sorry I did.  So many friends liked it.  They were disappointed that I didn’t. I felt uneasy.  How could I not love such a beautiful, sensitive, artistic depiction of these beautiful, sensitive, artistic characters?  And then I felt a little guilty. Did  my friends think I was rejecting them or their taste?  They didn’t think I was rejecting Keats, did they?  I was simply expressing my thoughts, but my thoughts differed from theirs:  was that a problem?
 
Horse races aside, I guess it’s only human to want others to like what we like.  When we find a book that transports us, it feels like a gift to say to someone, “Here–you must read this.”  If they don’t like it, it does feel like rejection. Of our book, of our taste. Of our…well, not let’s not go there.  Or if it’s not rejection, then at least it’s the small loss of something we might have shared.  

It feels risky, too, when you’re the one voicing the opinion. 

“What did you think?”  

“Well, I thought…(oh, now I have to expose my thinking, my taste, discernment, intelligence, sense of humor–maybe I could just chicken out)  Um…I thought it was ok.”  

(But maybe they’d like to hear what I think, have a discussion, see my point, or try to convince me that I missed something in it.)  

“Well, actually, I didn’t like it so much.”  

“What? How could you not like it?”

Does that mean, how could you not like it when you’re a friend of mine?  Or when you’re an intelligent person?  Vanilla/chocolate, po-tay-to/po-tah-to.  Should we just keep our opinions to ourselves?

I wonder, when we ask, “what did you think,” what is it we really want to know? 

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“Starting here, what do you want to remember?”

I thought this morning of that opening line from William Stafford’s beautiful poem, “You Reading This, Be Ready.” I was listening to an NPR interview with two Microsoft researchers, one of them the first user of “MyLifeBits” which essentially makes a record of his entire life–where he goes, what he does, the phone conversations he has, the tv programs he watches, the meals he eats. Every moment of his life is being archived for…well, for whatever–anything from convenient recall to resource for distant posterity. At last, a way to remedy the famously flawed human memory: just record everything.

And I thought how making every minute of every day one to remember means that no minute and no day is memorable.

If, as we used to say in the ‘60s, “everything is beautiful” or, as Garrison Keillor (good health to him!) says now, “the children are all above average,” then what is good? What is excellent? What is memorable?

The Jewish prayers that accompany the beginning and ending of the sabbath speak of separation and distinction, one day marked as different from others. I thought of my recent wedding ceremony where, again, mention was made of separation–in this case two people set aside for each other. Who would we be without making some kind of order among those moments and people and things in our lives, without making distinctions, assigning values?

We can respect the minutes and the minute details that add up to our days and years. Time is, of course, our only real possession. And forgetting can be inconvenient or worse. But don’t some things deserve to be forgotten? Can we truly honor our time without making a distinction between the minutes of driving to the dentist or paying bills and those of seeing a friend or reading a book or one of the other small fortunate events that add up to what our lives are?

I think what we should be concentrating on is not recording but noticing. Every day things happen that would amaze us if we took the time to notice them. Not everything, but some things.

Every day people are in our lives in ways that sustain us. Not every person, but some people.

Starting here, what can you live with forgetting?

What do you want to notice?

What do you want to remember?

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Lessons from Julia’s book

I’ve just returned home from the neighborhood farmers’ market with a bulging bag of what August does best–corn and tomatoes and melons. Also pea tendrils from a stall of Asian vegetables where I was discussing recipes with two Haitian women. And long lavender Chinese eggplants I need to find a recipe for.

It’s the bountiful season, no doubt, that’s put me in the mood to cook the fruits of my hunting and gathering. But according to this morning’s New York Times, we’re also all under the spell of Julia and The Book. (And if you haven’t yet seen the movie, have you got a treat waiting for you!

My copy of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” has a slightly ripped binding. It’s old (first edition, 14th printing) and spattered and has notes penciled in beside many of the recipes (“next time make the brown-braised onions FIRST”). I was a new bride and Julia taught me to cook. She also taught me to be ambitious and adventurous in the kitchen. Maybe even outside the kitchen. And maybe that was her most enduring lesson, the reason a new generation of cooks is making her book a best-seller today. Yes, we know what is healthy to eat, but maybe eating shouldn’t be only about what sustains our bodies.

People in other countries seem to know it better than we do here in America, the idea that eating just may be also about sustaining our souls with food that we take the time to prepare with careful attention and eat not standing up or driving, but sitting at a table with people to whom we also give careful attention.

Julia’s ‘60s ultimately gave way to the excessive ‘80s and we started paying more attention to amounts on our plates–enormous or minceur–and her lessons started slipping away from us. But Nora Ephron and Julie Powell have given us a chance to relearn them. A little butter isn’t a terrible thing. Good food rarely comes in a box with listed ingredients. Cooking is an art, but it can be mastered. And savoring good food in the company of friends and family is one of the great pleasures we are given in this life.

Bon appetit to you, Julia. And to Nora, Julie, Meryl, Amy. And to us.

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New on the bookshelf: “The Cure for Grief” by Nellie Hermann

My friend Susan Ebert, always a source of great reading suggestions and important ideas, introduced me to the work of Nellie Hermann. Nellie grew up in Newton, Massachusetts and earned an M.F.A. from Columbia and has a first novel out, “The Cure for Grief.” It tells a story of unimaginable sadness and creates what Kirkus Review terms, “a gorgeously readable meditation on mourning and survival.” It is newly out in paperback and has just been selected by Target as one of their “breakout books” for the summer. I asked Nellie to tell us about the book and here is what she said:

“’The Cure for Grief’ was not my title, originally, and I had some hesitation about its finality. Would people pick up my book expecting a true “cure,” and then be disappointed? As time has passed, though, I have grown to like it more and more, if for no other reason than the recognition that writing the book was as close to a cure as I will ever get.

“When I was in high school, I lost both my father and the youngest of my three brothers within a year, to brain tumors. A few years before that, when I was in fifth grade, my oldest brother was diagnosed with a severe mental illness. My father, who died when he was 58, was a Holocaust survivor, whose story had always been fascinating to me, as well as out of reach.

“The ramifications of all of this tragedy, the tendrils of which went back a long way, were deep and long and inappropriate for a blog post, but suffice it to say that it took me many years to be able to tell people about my story (and even now it’s still hard). Writing was where I felt comfortable letting out even a little of what I felt, and even there I wrote around my own story for a long time. It was when I was in graduate school, and a teacher diagnosed my stories as always having “damaged males on the side,” that it dawned on me that it was time to confront the story head on.

“’The Cure for Grief’’ is a work of fiction, and for me this is a lot of where the “cure” part comes in. Processing what I had been through was a necessary act—revisiting scenes that were painful for me, confronting images that I had been carrying around for years and that were beginning to fester—but just as necessary was the act of creation around what had really happened, the act of transforming my own story into one that could be given away. There was no way I could do justice to my actual family—I could not bring them back—and accepting this was crucial to being able to write the book and create Ruby, my main character, and her family, that resembles mine and yet is not mine. Giving coherence and shape to something that in real life did not (and does not) necessarily have such qualities was a truly powerful act, and one that transformed my life. Creating a new family, and watching them go through the pain and come out the other side; giving the story a home that was outside of my own body, was not a cure, but was as close as I can come.

“And the title, which I approve of more and more, came about in a way that could not be denied: many titles were being thrown about, none of which were quite right, and my editor typed the word “ruby” into an internet search engine and came up with the fact that in ancient times, rubies were thought to be cures for grief. I had not known this when I named my main character, but it seemed too significant a coincidence to be ignored.

“It is my hope that the book can be of help or interest to people who have or are experiencing grief, or can help those who haven’t to perhaps understand better the people in their lives who have. Being in touch with a few readers who have reached out to me to tell me their stories has been a great joy and an unintended consequence. I believe deeply in the power of narrative to transform the most terrible moments of our lives, in the act of reading as well as writing, and getting to share my story in this way is a gift that only continues to grow.”