Refuge: 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

Kindred 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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Someone 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 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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Wave 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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Artful 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 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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