Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Seattle Public Library, our Book Club and The Spinster

I will rant a bit on how ridiculous the "rebranding opportunity" for Seattle Public Library is to spend half a million dollars on changing its name by one letter in a venture that has nothing to do with books or programs to further reading and learning as stated in their new brand statement. Take the survey:  https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PBTWRN2
And who goes to the Libraries? I go to my branch of the Seattle Public Library but not to the Libraries. It sounds pretentious and inaccurate. If it is their desire to expand into plural libraries, why not pay to reciprocate fully with the King County Library System so we can place holds with them. And there's no getting around the sickening waste of money by an organization that is annually strapped for funds. Madness prevails, or marketing models. Next they'll call it Amazonlibrary or Googlibrary like the sports arenas. Don't even suggest it.

This year we have a good selection of book club titles, international and domestic, new and old, to make up our reading list for this year which are listed below. The voting session went smoothly and quickly and probably deciding on dates was the most challenging use of our time. Helen's heavenly sour cream lemon pie was the reward for our endeavors.

Lispector, Clarice. Near to the Wild Heart (Brazilian) - October
Maxwell, William. They Came Like Swallows (American) - November
Doyle, Brian. The Plover (American) - December
Daoud, Kamel. Meurault Investigation with Camus' The Stranger (Algerian)- Jan
Vasquez, Juan Gabriel. The Sound of Things Falling (Colombian) - February
Zink, Nell. The Wallcreeper (American but German setting) - March
Mitchell, Judith Claire. A Reunion of Ghosts (American) - April
Gadda, Carlo Emilio. That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana (Italian) - May
Ferrante, Elena. My Brilliant Friend (Italian) - June









Last night I read The Spinster by Kate Bolick which is particularly enjoyable in its memoir sections, alternates with biographical and academic info and includes a good bibliography (my weakness:  more books to read). The narrator explains her own decision to live alone in spite of a long-term relationship and her fascination with literary figures from her Northeastern MA background who demonstrate how the "demands of domesticity can limit women's literary production". She describes five women and their lives and references others to support her thesis: New Yorker essayist and short story author Maeve Brennan (Alice Munro called her 1972 story, "The Springs of Affection,""one of her favorite short stories of all time.") Vogue editor and novelist Neith Boyce, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edith Wharton and feminist writer ("The Yellow Wall-paper") Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I put the book aside for a moment and then when it became overdue, gobbled it up in an evening. That happens to me often with library due dates which my former profession instilled in me as "suggestions" rather than gospel, so I fund my Seattle Public Library rather than add to the bursting-at-the-seams volumes in my own.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

The GoldfinchThe Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Trust the hype, it's been a while since I read a 780-page book in 5 days and actually suffered pangs awakening and realizing it was over. I'd finished it after almost a week of constant company.  No more The Goldfinch to fall into and evade most other activities. And what will become of Theo? of Pippa?  They are still in their twenties when the book ends but the story of their meeting, their sublime disastrous connection precludes a future or does it? Theo's almost hopeful final thoughts close the story as he adds his "love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them."  Tartt has succeeded in keeping me enthralled from the events at the museum and their tragic aftermath and the glaring descriptions of Las Vegas living and youthful drug exploration on into serious addiction to the vagaries of curating and exploiting antique furniture.  A 14-year-old boy is possessed by a 17th C painting of a captive goldfinch, an actual work of art by Fabritius. "if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don't think 'oh, I love this picture because it's universal.' 'I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.' That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you...an individual heart-shock. Your dream...yours, yours. I was painted for you."  The book spoke to this reader.


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Saturday, September 5, 2015

The Folded Clock: A DiaryThe Folded Clock: A Diary by Heidi Julavits
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits is self-absorbed and absorbing, reflective, boring to some but not to me, diary of a young woman's thoughts with each date starting "Today I..." and continuing with an anecdote or meditation about her life, i.e. I walked by here when I was on my way to have an affair with the man who became my second husband, or I swam for hours on the last day of our Maine vacation in t he little town where I have summered most of my life, or I went to see my therapist who did not answer the door or I fought with my husband when we were in Berlin. and she continues to muse on these beginnings for a few pages before we willy nilly move on to another date, not necessarily chronological. As a writer, and one not given to this kind of introspection, I found her entries fascinating. I listened to the book on CD and my husband did not share my enthusiasm even though she's funny at times and off the wall with her neuroses. It was a voyeurish excursion but the worries and obsessions about aging and death and friendship which concern her are shared by many women and I was sorry to have the book end. I'd buy another installment.


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The Green Road by Anne Enright

The Green RoadThe Green Road by Anne Enright
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Green Road was sheer poetry, some of the best writing I've enjoyed in a long time. Anne Enright is the kind of writer who makes me want to toss my pen, she is so good and her work appears effortless:   "Rome was 1962, an audience with the Pope, a man on a little Vespa, so handsome he would cut you, with a fat brown baby on his knee. Oh and Roma, Roma! The unexpected piazzas, the sprays of orange blossom, an old codger on the tram who stank of garlic so badly -- Rosaleen should have realised that morning sickness was setting in. Dan was conceived in Rome. And Dan loved garlic! There was no end to the mysteries of Dan.". The story of a family told through the lives of each of the grown children and their mother in Ireland, it ends with a family Christmas which is a stunning chapter on the trauma and tragedy faced by many on the enforced holidays slated to be joyful, and the priceless litany of groceries brought in by the striving-to-please daughter Constance as she unloads almost 500 Euros of foodstuffs to please all, forgetting the coffee. Poignant, funny, and deeply affecting, the book is a top choice for me this year. Knausgaard is next or maybe Elena Ferrante.


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Tuesday, June 30, 2015

The Odd Woman and the City: A MemoirThe Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir by Vivian Gornick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Vivian Gornick becomes a flaneur in her own city and relates priceless anecdotes of her encounters along her walks, with strangers and with friends. It is a prize for anyone who loves good writing, musing on friendship, culture, identity and New York City.


Everything I Never Told YouEverything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
My rating: 4 of 5 stars




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I zoomed through this beautifully written story of a family at tragic odds with each other as the children suffocate trying to live the dreams of their parents and race and gender haunt each of them.The relationships have an occasional hollowness and some character development was sketchy (e.g. relentless of the parental line and coldness of friends and neighbors), but the title says it all about the inability of some families to share feelings and communicate.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

5th Chuckanut Writers Conference - "I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic." Leonard Bernstein

I just wrote Chuckanut "reader's" instead of writer's conference but I am a writer and a reader.  I just returned from http://chuckanutwritersconference.com/ Gathering in Bellingham at Whatcom Community College, we were inspired and surprised about writing -- from daily practice to the author's platform in preparation for publishing. What did I learn? "If I am going to get anything right, I have to risk getting it wrong." From Poet Sam Green (Brooding Heron Press) we gleaned the importance of "small noticings" in which you write down observations on walks or sitting in waiting rooms or anywhere, jotting down phrases to be mined later.  From Elizabeth George (soon out with another Inspector Lynley, Banquet of Consequences) I learned to create a character and came away enthused to try writing fiction. From Brian Doyle we learned the invaluable gift of stories. A panel on process offered the varied ways each of the writers does their job from cutting and pasting (Erik Larson), to elaborate character studies and scenes (Elizabeth George) to daily morning practice in an office away from home with an outline on a large salvaged window pane (Steven Galloway) to the value of perfecting small manageable chunks into which she digs deeper rather than outline(Carol Cassella). All do extensive research which can become procrastination if you don't get to the writing. And send your stuff out counsels Brian Doyle (Mink River and The Plover)As do Jennifer Worick and Kerry Colburn who run the website   www.bizofbooks.com and www.twitter.com @jenandkerry and teach publishing preparation including author platform such as, who knew? writing a blog. Kay Lebo, whose essay on hearing won a place in current edition of Best American Essays, held us rapt with her talk. It was an intensive two days and I am delighted to have gone, only regretting I could not be in triplicate to catch all of the simultaneous workshops. And I'm grateful to have been hosted by Writer Marilyn McClellan in her roomy comfortable house with the Pacific Northwest's best view.

Sunday, March 29, 2015

The WhitesThe Whites by Harry Brandt


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While I admired Price's Lush Life, The Whites did not grip me as thoroughly although my traveling companion liked it a lot. It was fine for sleepy vacation reading and the author (otherwise known as Richard Price) is a stellar writer, tossing out admirable metaphors and description like "In the middle of the cramped living room, Horace Woody, deep into his sixties but DNA-blessed with the physique of a lanky teenager, stood hands on hips in his boxers, the taut skin across his flat chest the color of a good camel hair coat. But his eyes were maraschinos, and his liquored breath was sweet enough to curl Billy's teeth." And this bit right out of a 30's film noir:
She'd been a golden girl once and she took her tumble hard.
"Hey how's it going?" Billy said as he took a seat.
"The meat's so tough that it got up off the plate and beat the shit out of the coffee, which was too weak to defend itself."
The plot, relationships, grudges and murders befuddled me but the writing and character sketches kept me going, a reversal from the usual thriller.

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The Discomfort Zone: A Personal HistoryThe Discomfort Zone: A Personal History by Jonathan Franzen



Entertaining, well-written memoir from the author of The Corrections and Freedom. If you're not interested in the growing up story of Jonathan Franzen and his nerdy, bookwormy Midwestern youth and beleaguered, irritating parents, read it for the marvelous descriptions of birding in the last part of the book. We listened to it on a road trip and it was excellent fare.

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Monday, March 2, 2015

Self-Pity by D. H. Lawrence

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
- See more at: http://allpoetry.com/Self-Pity#sthash.NQDfTfZ8.dpuf

Thursday, February 26, 2015

Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and PlaceRefuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Refuge – what an excellent book to bring one up short about prejudices. I knew of this book for years but feared the theme was too religious and nature study for my taste. I knew the author was Mormon and lived in Utah and the book had to do with birds. As soon as I read a few pages, I was awed by the beauty of the writing, the themes of refuge and grief undertaken by the writer, a naturalist. I even became interested in the different birds described in each chapter and read the book with a Peterson’s Guide to Birds on my lap. The interesting thing about the story is that Refuge might be described by some as a book about losing one’s mother to cancer and seeking a way through grief and loss while others might say it is a book about nature and the birds losing their habitat due to climate changes and pollution. It’s both and richer for it. I can’t recommend it highly enough to both memoir readers and nature lovers and any thoughtful reader.


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Kindred by Octavia Butler

KindredKindred by Octavia E. Butler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Although I was not enthusiastic about this book club choice, I am glad to have read it. It generated a lively discussion about the themes of slavery and oppression which arise when a modern (1976) African American woman finds herself travelling back in time to 1819 on a Maryland farm, forced to rescue an ancestor to assure his and her own survival, and she must live as a slave in doing so. The writing struck me as clear but not lyrical. There was almost too much dialog at times but the story is a good one and trundled me along to its unsatisfactory ending. The protagonist and her husband do a little historical research but never really resolve this strange occurrence and how it permanently changed their lives.


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Tuesday, January 13, 2015

SomeoneSomeone by Alice McDermott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The story, the poetic writing, took my breath away as her Brooklyn Irish family came alive in McDermott's beautiful, compassionate telling of Marie and her neighbors packed together in a neighborhood of brownstones and twilight stickball and Mass.  In the final pages the mystery unfolds of her tragic, golden brother whom she "had associated with the sacred darkness...or the hushed groves of the seminary, or the spice of the incense in the cavernous church, even with his lifelong, silent communion with the words he found in his books. Incomprehensible, yes, but in the same way that much that was holy was incomprehensible to me, little pagan."  I did not want the book to end.


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Diana Vreeland Memos: The Vogue YearsDiana Vreeland Memos: The Vogue Years by Alexander Vreeland
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What a personality! And not a single exclamation point as she guided Vogue with inspiration and verve, sending instructions and thanks to Beaton, Avedon, her editors, her friends. Stunning photos although the memos become repetitive over 300 pages.


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WaveWave by Sonali Deraniyagala
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala is a devastating portrait of grief but also it is a picture of love and living on after tragedy. Her family (husband, two sons, her parents) were lost to the tidal wave which hit Sri Lanka in 2004. Each is portrayed vividly and engenders a start and a smile as these recollections become more bearable.  There are poetic descriptions of nature such as her trip to Sweden where she is “on the deserted shores of a lake of ice, surrounded by naked birches sheathed in frozen fog, each branch glowing like a stag’s antlers in velvet in that mellow light” and .on her return to Yala where the wave hit, she sees “the sea eagles that had thrilled”  her son, “bold in this desolation, they sailed low, sudden shadows striking the bare ground,” or a boat trip to see the blue whales: “a foamy mass heralds the head that rises to the surface, its shape an ancient arch.”  She parses out fond recollections of growing up in Sri Lanka, her family, their culture including the food they ate (curries, shrimp pastes, fruit, fish), her father’s library in their house, her mother’s sari collection, their  vacations, friends and servants. She writes evocatively and I was compelled to keep reading despite the sadness and pain.  The end of the book, seven years after her loss, grants a whiff of hope as she is able finally to recall joyful moments with her missing loved ones in her new home in New York City which has given her “the distance for which I can reach for my family…travel[ing] back and forth to London and Columbo, rediscovering us.” The book was on several “best of 2013” lists and now goes on mine.


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ArtfulArtful by Ali Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Smith is a genius and her essays/talks on time, on form, on edge, on offer and on reflection but also a love story sent me immediately to buy the book as I handed in my library copy. Starting right off, she quotes Dickens from an old orange Penguin edition of Oliver Twist, then the myth of Achilles, Alice in Wonderland,The Golden Bowl, Jane Austen from an obscure title Jack & Alice. Ozi e vizi a Pammydiddle which I can only find on here in Italian, Walter Benjamin,Joseph Conrad,José Saramago.  I can't stop. I'm scurrying all over the house looking for copies of every book mentioned, placing library orders,expanding my swollen To Read list like the crazy bibliophile and avid poetry reader I answer to.  Who is Gordon Mackay Brown?  GR doesn't know but I must find out. And I haven't even touched on her exquisite prose and wonderful mind, linking literature, art, movies, music. It is all here.


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Summer Will ShowSummer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sylvia Townsend Warner has written a beautifully crafted tale of a 19th C wealthy, landed and slightly smug Englishwoman who spurns her adulterer husband, loses her children from smallpox and flees to France. There she finds herself stretching her feminist inklings to forge a new life with her husband's ex-mistress and embraces the revolution of 1848 happening around her. As Minna, her new companion, says "Though you may think you have chosen me..or chosen happiness,it is the revolution you have chosen." My commonplace book at the ready, there were abundant quotations to jot down, some outright humorous, but mainly the clear thinking and revolutionary story of a woman's transformation which propel the reader along. Townsend Warner was a contemporary of Woolf and Mansfield and equal to them in her writing. We read this book for a book club and the conversation flowed hither and yon.


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The Children ActThe Children Act by Ian McEwan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very much a McEwan story with stalker?, bits of arcane knowledge of the law, marital agonies and all but I was absorbed throughout, particularly with his main character, the woman judge, and the way he got inside her head.


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10:0410:04 by Ben Lerner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Just put down Ben Lerner's 10:04 which is the semi-autobiographical story of a young author who is on sabbatical from college teaching and may or may not have Marfan's Syndrome (which Lincoln had). He is trying to impregnate his best friend, Alex,not his "girlfriend," but a platonic friend whom he met in college. She is 36, unemployed and wants to have a child and he is elected as good father material. The plot rambles through Brooklyn on their walks and Manhattan to the fertility clinic. He acts as big brother to an 8-year-old Latino boy named Roberto. He sells a book contract for a strong six figures ( “about twenty-five years of a Mexican migrant’s labor, seven of Alex’s in her current job. Or my rent, if I had rent control, for eleven years. Or thirty-six hundred flights of bluefin, assuming the species held.”) and flies to a residency in Marfa, Texas where he hibernates, walks, writes a poem rather than his novel. The themes of walking and of art and poetry run through the book, along with his fear of a dissecting aorta, another symptom of Marfan's. He watches the movie "Back to the Future" during two threatening hurricanes (Irene & Sandy) which is where the title originates. The language challenges: he does not cry but has a "lacrimal event." He suffers proprioception, a sort of unconscious awareness of the body's internal stimulii to external events. And I experienced the usual challenges of reading in bed, unwilling to get up and look up the words because I am smitten with the story, the writing, the references to Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Robert Creeley, the obscure National Book Award winner William Bronk, the teaching/writing couple whose "house [was] so full of books that it seemed built of books," movies like The Stranger with Orson Welles, the exhibit of the Institute for Totaled Art (rescued from an insurance company warehouse). It is a book which is worthy of its challenges and I will be first in line for his next one. I loved it. Slate reviews it expertly here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/bo...
Or bookforum here http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_...


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The Year We Left HomeThe Year We Left Home by Jean Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another beautifully written book about an Iowa clan over the last decades of the 20thC.  Thompson's ear for dialogue is flawless and I found myself reading aloud passages to my nearest at every opportunity.


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My Old Sweetheart by Susanna Moore

My Old SweetheartMy Old Sweetheart by Susanna Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although I read this many years ago, it's evocative descriptions of Hawaii and growing up there stay with me and it remains one of my all-time favorites.  As www.dovegreyreader.com so perfectly described it in her 1/27/2011 review:
I always think as I read a book like My Old Sweetheart that I want to read many more books like this. Spell-binding and measured books with a store of quietly held revelations kept in reserve, that make me gasp a little, novels that countenance no interruption and make you look up to think and then feel quite surprised to find that the world is still there happening around you. This felt like a book of blessed quietness, it has a quality of stillness and fragrance about it, created  in part by the heady languor of the heat with its power to oppress and stifle, but also to radiate and infiltrate. There is a certain  light that shimmers here, and a moment when Anna and Lily swim to an underwater cave that actually transported me there....yes, holding my breath to dive and feeling that slight sense of panic about getting out again, even if I was sitting here in my thermals.


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Review of Giving Up the Ghost

Giving Up the GhostGiving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mantel's is the kind of writing which leaves you thinking why bother with your own scribbles. She is so good.  The ghost of her stepfather flickers on the first page, then a hundred pages in we are alerted to the apparition seen in the garden at the age of six or seven; this is the ghost which haunts the rest of her memoir: "I am writing in order to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness; and in order to locate myself, in not within a body, then in the narrow space between one letter and the next, between the lines where the ghosts of meaning are." She remembers the people she knew including her family and her "best friend" who was mean to her,  the Catholicism of her early years, her confused little person thoughts, games played by name and the size, color and story of many classic books. She recalls every place she has lived and the pains of marital breakups and moving. She writes about her grueling medical history with just enough detachment and wit that you can keep reading and marvel at her metaphors:  "I have been so mauled by medical procedures, so sabotaged and made over, so thin and so fat, that sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into being..." And after a diagnosis finally arrives. "I am a shabby old building in an area of heavy shelling, which the inhabitants have vacated years ago." Her descriptions can be reread over and over: On their first marital lodgings: "We couldn't get the stately family wardrobe upstairs, so it stayed down, its fine mirror reflecting the flickering of the silverfish as they busied cheerfully about their lives." It is the work of a master writer.


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Fleeing Fundamentalism: A Minister's Wife Examines FaithFleeing Fundamentalism: A Minister's Wife Examines Faith by Carlene Cross
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fleeing Fundamentalism: A Minister's Wife Examines Faith was a class assignment which I resisted, it not being a topic of much interest but within thirty pages or so, I found the book to be a page-turner. The author is a good and descriptive writer with a sense of humor.  I appreciated her thorough nature as she enhanced her biblical study with historical research. Her missionary junket behind the Iron Curtain was tense and suspenseful and the ways in which her marriage to a Northwest Baptist preacher evolved was a shocker, confirming my suspicions about fundamentalist conservatism and misogyny.  Her exploratory journey into and away from the confines of this secretive, scary extremism is an enlightening and entertaining trip to another world.


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