Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au


Cold Enough for Snow is a quiet novel about a woman and her mother touring Japan. It is so quiet that almost nothing happens, they take trains, go sightseeing, hear music, shop, eat meals, walk and talk--very matter-of-fact. The book has an almost daunting tiny font-size and is only ninety-five pages. Yet, squinting, I read on enjoying the author's perfect, measured writing and calm in this author's reflections.

"I asked my mother what she believed about the soul and she thought for a moment. Then, looking not at me but at the hard, white light before us, she said that she believed that we were all essentially nothing, just series of sensations and desires, none of it lasting. When she was growing up, she said that she had never thought of herself in isolation, but rather as inextricably linked to others. Nowadays, she said, people were hungry to know everything, thinking that they could understand it all, as if enlightenment were just around the corner. But, she said, in fact there was no control, and understanding would not lessen any pain. The best we could do in this life was to pass through it, like smoke through the branches, suffering, until we either reached a state of nothingness, or else suffered elsewhere. She spoke about other tenets, of goodness and giving, the accumulation of kindness like a trove of wealth. She was looking at me then, and I knew that she wanted me to be with her on this, to follow her, but to my shame I found that I could not and worse, that I could not even pretend."

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In Love

In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Amy Bloom
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Extraordinary, wise, sad, funny tale of novelist Amy Bloom's journey to Zurich to help her dementia-troubled husband realize his last wish. I learned a lot about our so-called freedom to die laws, and about a loving marriage.

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Aurelia, Aurélia

Aurelia, Aurélia: A Memoir by Kathryn Davis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Poignant, funny, literary. Hypnotic says the jacket, I read it in one sitting under the spell of the writing, the story, the fairy tales, dogs, music, and literature references. And then I turned to the front to start it again. Not linear but realistic in the unexpected flashes that accompany grieving and memory.

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Heartbreak: a personal and scientific journey

Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey by Florence Williams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Interesting exploration of physical and social ramifications of heartbreak in which the author explores advent of her own Type 1 diabetes diagnosis after her husband of 25 yrs leaves her. Skilled science writing entwined with personal experience make the story compelling.

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The Book of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the tart, tender and unruly

The Book of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the Tart, Tender, and Unruly by Kate Lebo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Compelling essays, sometimes humorous, always helpful about the difficulty of preparing and growing fruit intertwined with rich tales of family and the author's own health challenges and how fruit might help, including a handful of delectable recipes. Love the title.

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A Room of One's Own

Amazed that I didn't read this earlier. My copy looks like I've had it since high school and that well may be true. Extant for almost 100 years, Woolf's signature ironic and wry skills heralding the need for a room with a locked door and an income is a classic. As is the tragic old ballad about Mary, Queen of Scots: Yest're'en the Queen had fower Marys The nicht she'll hae but three There was Mary Seton and Mary Beaton, And Mary Carmichael and me Woolf cleverly uses her narrator Mrs. Beton or Mrs. Seton to espouse her revolutionary ideas for women artists as the reader is escorted through colleges, libraries and dining halls (banished from some, welcomed in others) and wraps up with another of the old ballad's namesake's, Mary Carmichael, as example of a woman author. They showcase the centuries of difficulties women have had to endure to be creative. "...this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides'..." I was surprised at how prescient the book is and once again, I mean to read more of her work.

Mercy Street

Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Highly recommended: Suspenseful, read-aloud writing, incredible characterizations, and as prescient as possible given its theme of a woman who works as a counselor in an abortion clinic. As Ron Charles wrote in the Washington Post, "Mercy Street carefully sketches out the geography of poverty, that invisible realm that lies just beyond the horizon of middle-class life. Without condescension or sentimentality, Jennifer Haigh describes people who aspire to live in a double-wide trailer, who must decide between paying the water bill and the cable bill, who feel the humiliation of using food stamps. Indeed, that life was Claudia’s adolescence, a background that makes her particularly attuned to the logic of the clinic’s poorer clients."

He goes on "Claudia’s mother, who had no particular interest in parenting, took in foster kids expressly to get extra cash from the state. Haigh never pushes on this theme, but she doesn’t need to: It’s clear that Claudia’s early exposure to the multitude of children unwanted by anyone and carelessly warehoused by the government has made her determined to present women with real reproductive choices."
The descriptions of snowy NE weather and roads, and conversations among the wildly varied cast of characters were on the mark, as, I imagine, were the strange mental meanderings of the gun freak haunting the Internet. Reminded me a bit of The Beans of Egypt, Maine Fine work.

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