Great (but Easy) Books to End a Reading Slump

When I read/hear a book review/author interview, if the book sounds good, I put a request in at the local library--the same goes for social media.  But often, it takes many months before I actually read the book, which means I often don't remember where I heard about the book.  In some ways, it doesn't matter, but I'm often curious, particularly if the book disappoints.

I'm happy to report that my 3 latest reads have not disappointed.  I am always overjoyed when I get books that are the kind of reading experiences where I get lost in the book and/or when I wake up thinking about the book.

*  Still Life by Sarah Winman was not that kind of book.  It was more gently compelling, a perfect just before bed kind of read, when I can only read a page or two, every evening or so.  It was a book about two characters who meet in Tuscany as WWII is coming to an end and the ways their lives revolve around Tuscany and each other.  It was a delight of a read, not the 800 page sprawling history, but encompassing post-WWII 20th century history nonetheless.  It showed humans at their best, and occasionally (enough to make the book compelling) not at their best.  What made it gentle is that the characters were able to recover from bad behavior.  It's the kind of book that bubbles up in my brain occasionally, and in a good way.

-- Nonesuch by Francis Spufford was also rooted in World War II, but it was a different approach, with time traveling and wizardry of a sort.  I loved the main character, a woman both of her time and ahead of her time, lots of interesting insights about gender and relationships and finance.  I had trouble visualizing the way the time travel happened, by way of statues and shapes shifting, so I scanned the pages and pages of description, and had a reading experience that came out just fine.  It was a fun but also serious read about fights against fascists, both the historically accurate kind (Britain during the bombings of London) and the time travelling, fantastical kind.

*  The Wedding People by Alison Espach was a different kind of delight, revolving around the ways we try to redeem our lives through our relationships.  At first, I almost took it back to the library, because I didn't want to read about very expensive weddings and the entitled people who want them.  But the book was in high demand, even though it was published in 2022, so I decided to read the first chapter--and I was hooked.  The main character is an adjunct English faculty member, so there's some delightful stuff about reading and teaching, along with lots of humor--and a happy ending!

# Next up is Colored Television by Danzy Senna.  How delightful to have a bit of time to return to reading, one of my earliest loves. 

* I put these books on my list after reading Paisley Rekdal's March 18 Facebook post:  "OK people, I'm getting ready for a little R&R time and I'm looking for a fun book that will tax no more than 5 brain cells. Like, writing that will basically bathe my frontal lobe in martinis and oxytocin and chocolate for a day or two then evaporate. A one-night stand of a book. A dumb but hot college boyfriend of a book. What is that book? I swear, I will go back to serious literature and yelling at my congresspeople and more paperwork in a week, but right now I just need a recommendation for a fun, IQ-obliterating read. No judgement. What is that book for you?"  These two books were so delightful and satisfying that I returned to her post this morning to capture some additional recommendations.

-- This book came to me by way of a Fresh Air interview with the author.

#  This book came by way of Leslie Pietrzyk's May 16 Facebook post of 4 books that she had recently read: "Earlier in the year I was in a patch of so-so books, and I'm delighted to report that these excellent beauties got me out of my slump! Highly recommend, and 3 are writer-adjacent!"   Her post reminded me that I heard good things about Colored Television when it first came out, so I requested it from the library, where it arrived in record time.

Ides of August, Seeds of Hope

There is something about late August that makes me feel doomed.  Let me document this year's ides of August.  I realize that we're almost two weeks out from the 13th, when the actual ides would be, according to the Roman calendar.

Actually, as I think back, August seems to be a sinkhole of a month, the month of beginning a war or launching an invasion (which will often start a war) or pulling out of a disaster of a policy or ignoring the intelligence which will lead to a disaster which will lead to a war (here I'm thinking of September 11).

Sadly, I don't expect U.S. policymakers to learn anything from our time in Afghanistan.  Reading this article about all the fruitless ways we've intervened in the world, starting with 1950's Korea, makes optimism a tough sell, and reading this article about Afghanistan in particular leads to despair.  But perhaps instead of looking back, I should be looking at our present.  What's being ignored?  What will we shake our heads at, 20 years from now, wondering why we didn't behave differently?  I suspect it will have something to do with the weather and the climate, something August foretells.  

It feels like it will be hot forever, the kind of hot that smothers, the hazy hot, not the clear heat.  I used to love to run in the middle of the day when I lived in Knoxville, Tennessee, where the high was 85 degrees, without much humidity.  I came home from a run feeling cleansed.  Lately, I've been coming in from my morning exercise feeling like I've been mugged.  It feels like the world is either on fire or being flooded.  This year, that feeling seems more like fact than metaphor.

I've been tripping over my feet.  This doesn't happen every August, but I do remember a few years ago commenting on my skinned knees.  This August, I'm pulling my left hamstring over and over again.  I've tripped over a suitcase, tripped over a palm frond, tripped over a seam in the parking garage lot at work.  I've kept myself from falling, but at cost to my hamstring.  It will heal, but it would heal faster if I didn't keep pulling it.

If I did a Google search of important artists who died in August, would I be surprised at how many of them have been important to me?  The death of Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones drummer, makes me ponder, while this article in The Washington Post made me smile at the idea of this person with a jazz sensibility making an interesting artistic life.

When I lived in places with more of a sense of seasons, it was easier to tell myself that in a few weeks, we'd get our first break in the heat.  Down here at the southeastern tip of the continent, I dread the uptick in the hurricane season, while also knowing we won't get a break in the heat for another 2-3 months.  Sigh.

And yet, let me not overlook the signs of hope, even if it's not the hope of autumnal weather and changing leaves.  My 6th floor condo balcony now has at least 3 chrysalises.  The mi-fi hot spot at work performed well yesterday; I can spend time complaining about how many e-mails I get in a regular day at work, so I was surprised to realize how anxious I felt when I was receiving no e-mails at all.

This morning, as I went on my morning walk/jog/run, I enjoyed a breeze that felt miraculous after weeks of moribund weather.  And I reflected on the poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, whose first novel The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois is an Oprah pick, while also getting a magnificent review by Ron Charles in The Washington Post.  

And let me remember that I got a correspondence yesterday letting me know that the article that I wrote for Gather will be published, and sending me forms to fill out for payment.  What great news.  It came after a day of internet restoration at work and me beginning to feel like I'm going to be able to be successful in seminary classes.

Many seeds are sprouting--let me focus on the ones that give me hope.

The Week in Reading

My spouse has had a dreadful cold all week--he's been spending lots of time sleeping.  The upside to this situation is that I have had time to read.  Here, in no particular order, are my adventures in reading this week:

Absolutely on Music:  Conversations by Haruki Murakami with Seiji Ozawa

I read the first 60 pages, and then I thought, this book really needs to come with a soundtrack.  At first, it's mildly interesting to read these conversations about classical recordings, but then it gets a bit boring.

I did scan the rest, and other interviews were similar.  But I did learn some information.  What stands out in my mind is this vision of a conductor getting up at 4 in the morning and spending time meditating on the musical score, meditating in silence.  I never thought about the conductor's role as much as I have with this book.  Ozawa (the conductor) gets up at 4 a.m. as does Murakami (to write).  I see writing as a solitary experience, but I didn't realize the conductor's experience had similar dynamics.

Hillbilly Elegy:  A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance

Would I have read this book if it hadn't been so much a part of the political campaign?  Likely--I do come from east Tennessee hillbilly stock myself.   But the conversations that swirled around this book during the political campaign did lead me to expect a different book.  It's not really a work of sociology.  No, it's a memoir.

As memoirs go, it's mildly interesting.  There are memoirs that explore the issue of white poverty much more lyrically, with more beautiful language--the Rick Bragg book All Over but the Shouting is my all-time favorite in this genre.  I would say the same thing if I was talking about dysfunctional family depictions.  Dorothy Allison's work is much more brutal--tough to read, but I couldn't put it down.  I didn't have a similar compulsion to return to Hillbilly Elegy.

It's interesting to think of these 2 issues in generational terms.  Bragg's work, and Allison's too, are about an older generation of white folks.  The drug of choice, and destroyer of families, in their work is alcohol.  In Vance's view, it's pain pills.

Hillbilly Elegy does a good job of describing the crisis in which so many communities find themselves.  It doesn't give any sense of what can be done about any of this--in fact, I came away with a bleakness about the prospect of lifting people out of poverty.

It is a memoir, after all.  Memoirs aren't required to create policy recommendations.  But it left me wishing for more.

My all time favorite book of the week (and perhaps of the year):

The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Drabble

What an amazing book!  I don't know if anyone is making a list of novels about aging that must be read--if so, add this one to the list.

But it's not just about aging.  That sounds dreary--but it's funny, even as it is a brutal discussion.  She's great at showing how the passions/rages of our younger years simply melt away as we age.  Even though I'm only 51 (twenty years younger than many of the characters in this book), that part felt real to me.

The book also discusses all the floods that threaten to swamp us:  aging, global warming with sea level rise, immigration, the wars that cause immigration--but above all, aging.  But again, it's warm and funny, even as it explores bleak subjects.

My English major heart also loved this book because I felt rewarded for my knowledge of literature.  Samuel Beckett's Happy Days lingers over the whole plot (two characters are going to see a revival), and there is an absurdist element to this book.  Like Beckett, the absurdist bits are often apocalyptic--but it's funnier than Beckett.  There are all sorts of allusions to all sorts of literature and history.  But the biggest delight for me was the fact that one character is reading the work of Esther Breuer--a character we first met in one of my favorite Margaret Drabble novels, The Radiant Way.

Much as The Radiant Way captures a time period, Thatcher's Britain, so does The Dark Flood Rises for ours.  What an amazing book.

During the next few weeks, I'll have to spend my free time grading for my online class--so I'm grateful to have had this week of reading.

President Obama's Reading List and My Latest Pick

Late in the afternoon yesterday, a colleague made microwave popcorn, and the smell wafted through the halls.  I thought about the popcorn that I didn't buy on Saturday when we went to see Hidden Figures.  I thought about my evening ahead, with my spouse out teaching.  I thought, I could have popcorn for dinner and spend the night reading.

And I did!

It was healthier popcorn than I would have purchased on Saturday, as I popped it in a pan with olive oil.  I drank iced tea instead of the gallon of soda I would have drunk on Saturday.

I read Zadie Smith's Swing Time, which is due back at the library soon--since it's just been nominated for the National Book Award, I won't likely be allowed to renew it.  With the first chapter, I thought about stopping--I found the constant comma splices to be disconcerting.  But the subject matter intrigued me, so I continued.  I read half of the book last night; it is good, although I like the parts that tell the story of the two main characters as young girls best.  I'm talking about the parts that show them as very young girls, not the material that comes later.

There's a passage about the sexual play of boys and girls, sexual play that's very close to rape, and it's quite an extended chunk of text.  So far, I can't figure out why it was necessary.  I'll be interested to see if I ever do as I finish the book.

On a more minor note, I'm also distracted by some of the very long paragraphs that go on for pages.  It's a stylistic trait of Smith's that has always bothered me.  I don't remember the constant comma splices from past books.

So far, I like On Beauty best of all her books.  I never made it through NW.  I will finish Swing Time, and I suspect I'll have similar feelings about it that I did with White Teeth:  overall, I liked it, but although parts were compelling, I won't read it again.

I came across this article which tells which fiction books Obama has read during his presidency.  I'm linking to it here so that I'll remember it the next time I'm casting about for books to read.  It's an interesting collection.

What I Read on my Arizona Vacation

There aren't many delights left when it comes to air travel:  one must get to the airport ridiculously early, and often one waits and waits for delayed planes, for the weather to clear, for it to be one's turn on the runway, and then, for the plane ride to be over.

But one of the delights of air travel, as readers of my blog know, is the chance to read.  And our recent trip to Arizona, I had plenty of opportunity for reading.

I began with Curtis Sittenfeld's Eligible, which was a brilliant modernization of Pride and Prejudice.  I ended with Elisabeth Egan's A Window Opens, which reminded me of I Don't Know How She Does It.  I found them both alternately delightful and tedious, with characters I both liked and grew tired of and then liked again.  In some ways, they're exploring aspects of modern women's lives that seem to have little to do with me and my current state.  I'm not figuring out how to meet an eligible man and marry him (Eligible) and while I am wrestling with career decisions, they are deeply different than the ones Egan's characters face.

I also read Shrill, by Lindy West, a book of essays which does have more of a narrative arc than I first thought.  As a larger woman myself, I found her meditations on being a fat woman in America to be compelling, but her thinking about comedy and rape jokes will likely be seen as more important on a theoretical level.

I had heard about Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies as ambitious and brilliant and important, and it may be all those things--but was it a good read?  Yes, for part of the book, but I lost patience somewhere along the way.  Clearly it's not meant to be a book of strict realism, but by the end, the plot twists become completely unbelievable--I could not suspend my disbelief.

And, at the risk of sounding like an elderly prude, I was shocked by the amount of sex in the book.  I almost put the book down after the first few scenes of bacchanalia; I found the main male characters' attitudes about women as sex object to be so offensive.  But then the scenes of parties (with less sex) in the early days of a marriage wooed me and kept me reading.

No, if I had to choose a book that wowed me with its ambition that would be Lionel Shriver's The Mandibles:  2029-2047, a chilling, compelling dystopia.  If you ever wondered what the USA would be like should its economy go the way of Venezuela, this book will tell you.  I found it so compelling that when I returned, I wanted to see what others had said.  When looking up reviews, I came across  this podcast where Shriver talks about writing it--a great podcast.

Some have criticized this book for its ponderous talk about economics and theory and modern life, and maybe it's the company I keep, but I didn't find the dialogue unbelievable.  I liked that the book was so thoroughly grounded in economic theories all along the spectrum.

I've always thought that novels set in the future or with supernatural elements tell us more about our current fears than about what we really think might happen--and this book certainly does.  Along the way we get interesting insights about life as we are currently living it too.

And so, to close, some quotes from the book:

"She dreaded Kurt's eviction.  When she first took in a tenant, she hadn't considered that, for landlords with a conscience, renting was closer to foster than commerce.  She couldn't bear kicking someone out who had no place to go" (pp. 163-164).

“Late in the day, she appreciated the miracle of civilization, whereby people paraded sacks of grocery, or jingled keys to a car, and were not immediately set upon.”

"Across the nation, Americans' mental and physical health had vastly improved.  Hardly anyone was fat.  Allergies were rare, and these days if people did mention they avoided gluten, a piece of bread would probably kill them.  Eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia had disappeared.  Should a friend say he was depressed, something sad had happened.  After a cascade of terrors on a life-and-death scale, nobody had the energy to be afraid of spiders or confined spaces or leaving the house" (p. 333).

A Field Guide to End Times and Our Times

I will be the first to admit that I'm the ideal reader for Jeannine Hall Gailey's Field Guide to the End of the World.  When I discovered The Walking Dead, I watched all of season 1 in a week-end.  I have strong views about the strengths and weaknesses of each of the movies in the1980's nuclear war triumvirate, Testament, The Day After, and Threads.  Some of my friends call me Apocalypse Gal, since I have calculated how to survive many a catastrophe.

As expected, I loved Gailey's poetry in her latest collection.  She has plenty of poems that imagine life after the apocalypse, most obviously in the series of Post-Apocalypse Postcard poems.  But she also makes clear that the apocalypses that will claim most of us are ones of illness and other aspects of modern life, not failures of government policies that lead to meltdowns.

Of course, there are those too.  More recent catastrophes, like the Fukushima plant in Japan, make an appearance here.  Gailey has a wonderful way of crystalizing these events into poems that give us a unique perspective on our modern life.

Along the way, she distills science lessons into unique poems.  We learn about ecotoxicology and junk science and mutagenesis and electromagnetics.  But even though I'm only tangentially schooled in these issues, and sometimes not at all, Gailey skillfully gives the reader enough information and explanation to understand the poem, but not so much that the poem sinks under the weight of it.

By now, you might be saying, "Sounds too much like homework.  I'm not reading this book."  But that would be a shame.  Not only are these poems some of the most intelligent poems I've read in years, but they're also funny.

I love the poems which twine together elements of popular culture and apocalypse.  One of my favorites was "Martha Stewart's Guide to Apocalypse Living."  Gailey perfectly captures the voice of Martha Stewart.

But most important, in envisioning end times, Gailey shows us all that we might appreciate right now, before we lose it.  The poems that end the book made me want to start taking pictures of trees or holding the hands of everyone I love. 

That's the larger message of the whole book, that we must appreciate what we have now, even as it might be slipping away.  She tells us that we will appreciate other aspects of life, whether it's a post-apocalyptic time or the time after an illness or any other disaster that might visit us.  But we don't need to wait to be filled with gratitude. 

These poems call us to a consciousness that will infuse our life with meaning.  These poems remind us that we don't need an apocalypse to come along to prove our worth.  These poems can remind us that worth can be found in a simple cup of coffee, if we would only slow down to appreciate that worth.

Surprised by Reading

I've had several reading surprises this week:

--I finally got around to reading Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman.  In ways, I liked it better than To Kill a Mockingbird.  It's not as unsophisticated as I thought it might be, and when Jean Louise, grown up Scout, offers a passionate defense of states' rights, I was impressed with the nuance.  I don't feel as betrayed by the discovery that Atticus is not as progressive on the subject of race as we might have thought.  In fact, he reminds me of my maternal grandfather, a Lutheran minister who served in South Carolina during the contentious time depicted in this novel.  Like Atticus, he had strong notions of justice, even if he didn't live them as fully as I might have hoped.  The novel could have done more to explore how Scout continues on with that knowledge, but we see her in the early stages of discovery.

--More on what I mean by that last sentence:  I'd like to see Scout/Jean Louise at midlife, when all of these issues which are presented in such starkness in Go Set a Watchman, may seem murkier.  But that would be a different book.

--I'd still like an answer to one of the modern mysteries of writers:  why did Harper Lee stop writing?  When she dies, will we find a stash of unpublished manuscripts?

--One of the aspects of the book that gets lost in the furor over the depiction of the aged Atticus is the gender issues--Jean Louise is also trying to figure out how to live her life in a world that gives her very few options.  And there are class issues too--what separates white trash from the upper class from the negro?

--I also read this compelling piece, the only essay ever to convince me that we should make the first 2 years of college free and just be done with it.  I have thought that we should make students pay something, a small something, just so they're invested.  Researcher Sara Goldrick-Rab calls the current financial aid system both unwieldy and meager, and she uses the word betrayal when describing the outcome:  "From the student's eyes, it's like you bought a Groupon that when you read it you got the impression it paid for 75 percent of whatever you were buying. You went to a nice restaurant you would never go to. And once you ate dinner you find out it only pays for 30 percent."

--Collin Kelley has decided to be more intentional in using social media to release poetry.  In this blog post, he explains:  "The question I kept asking myself is how many publication credits are enough? Over the last 20+ years, I've had poetry published in countless journals, magazines and online. Without a doubt, most people have discovered my work thanks to the Internet. I've grown accustomed to waiting weeks, months and longer for new work to appear in journals, but there is some work I want to put out right now. I don't want to wait."

--I read Jeannine Hall Gailey's latest collection of poems, Field Guide to the End of the World.  It was a delight in ways that are surprising and what I've come to expect from this talented poet.  I'm posting a more detailed review of this book on Thursday--stay tuned!

Rising Strong, Staying Open-Hearted

Hard to believe that two weeks ago we'd have already been on the road towards a great Thanksgiving.  I took with me some craft projects which I didn't complete.  As we've been cleaning/sorting/organizing, I came across some prayer shawls that were unfinished.  I thought I might finish them during our time away, but I didn't.  That's O.K.  I didn't finish them because I was having too much fun--plus I finished one of them last night.

During the very early morning hours of Thanksgiving week, I read Brene Brown's Rising Strong.  Until recently, I had never heard of this woman.  Then, about 2 months ago, people referenced this book again and again.  I'd read a blog post and see mention of this book.  I'd see a Facebook mention.  I'd hear someone talk about it.  Finally I decided to see if the library had it, and happily, I got it before Thanksgiving.

I really liked the book.  Much of it covers material I already knew, but it's good to have a reminder.  If you've spent any time around Recovery people, self-help people/books, and/or Oprah, you, too, likely already know this stuff.  But Brown's way of telling the material is powerful.  The woman knows how to tell a story!

I loved the story of an early morning swim on vacation with her husband--how she was thinking about how glorious it was, while he was still mired in a nightmare he'd had about his inability to save the children from drowning.  They have the kind of encounter that in early days might have led to a fight and days/months of bad feelings.  But in a process that Brown calls "The story I'm telling myself," they're able to talk about their emotional landscape and to deepen their bond.

I, too, have found it easier to talk earlier about what's going on with my emotional life.  I haven't gotten good enough yet to avoid the negative feelings completely, but at least I can say, "You might be perceiving this, but it's about this and not about you."  I've gotten much better at saying, "I'm feeling this way--is it legit or am I misreading something?"

My favorite part of the book was when she talks about the world being divided into 2 types of people:  those who believe that people are doing the best that they can, and those who believe that people could do so much better if they would just do so--in other words, the judgmental types.  And of course, some of us are both, depending on how tired we are, how unappreciated we feel, how much we feel like we have to do it all.

I find this an interesting question, and I've asked others if they agree with her division.  I've also started to ask people if they believe that we're all doing the best we can.  I may stop asking that question because the answers are starting to depress me.

Actually, I already knew that many of us don't believe that people are doing the best that they can do.  I have often said things like "I know that __________ didn't go to grad school hoping that they could shut down a department/school/church/institution"  or "I know that _____ is trying to solve this."  And usually, people say, "Yeah but, if they would just do ___________, then the problem would disappear."

This part of the book reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from theologian Marcus Borg, a thinker who generated many of my favorite quotes.  In The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith, he says,  "When I stand in a supermarket checkout line and all the people I see look kind of ugly, I know that my heart is closed" (page 154).

Brown shares her husband's insight:  "All I know is that my life is better when I assume that people are doing their best.  It keeps me out of judgment and lets me focus on what is, and not what should or could be" (p. 113).  I agree with him.

Brown explains why this might be true:  "Most of us buy into the myth that it's a long fall from 'I'm better than you' to 'I'm not good enough'--but the truth is that these are two sides of the same coin.  . . .  Self-righteousness is just the armor of self-loathing" (p. 119).

That last sentence alone would make the book worth reading--and much of the rest of the book is just as good.  I love a book that calls me to be my best self and does it by compelling story telling and great use of language.

A Book for Your Thanksgiving Break: "This Angel on My Chest"

If you're looking for a good book for your Thanksgiving holiday reading, I cannot recommend this book highly enough:

I've admired the work of author Leslie Pietrzyk for many years now.  My sister was the first to know her, as their work circles intersected in Alexandria, Virginia.  I loved her first book Pears on a Willow Tree, but this book is even more amazing, in terms of what she's managed to do in pushing the short story form and the linked short story form--she does all of this, while also creating highly readable stories.

The stories follow the trajectory of a woman whose husband has unexpectedly and suddenly died at a very young age early in the marriage.  It may sound like a morbid premise for a book, but it's not--sad, yes, in spots, but also funny and full of insight.

She adopts a variety of approaches in these stories:  a craft lecture, a list, a very very short story, a quiz, and of course, traditional short stories.  It's both experimental and familiar.

It's made me want to revisit all of my linked short stories.  It might be fun to rewrite some of them in different, experimental forms and see what happens.

For those of us interested in the art of putting together a collection of linked short stories, don't miss this interview with Pietrzyk.  She says, "So the selection of stories was important for me as well as their exact arrangement. I needed to signal early on that there would be some experimentation (so the first story is a list told in the second person) but I also wanted to reassure a nervous reader, which meant that a traditional (though short) story immediately followed. As I put together the collection, I kept asking myself what the role of each story was, what it accomplished in the bigger picture, and once that was my question, it became easier for me to see where I might have been repeating myself…and when it was time to yank something out."

Her writing/revision process was influenced by many different artists, from Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried to Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, along with visual artists like Mark Rothko and the “'tin foil shrine' housed in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a mysterious and glorious work of visionary art that James Hampton worked on for fourteen years in a garage; it was found after his death."

This kind of interview, with its attention to the craft involved in putting together a collection of linked short stories, makes me wonder if there's a book out there that addresses the subject.  I'd love to see a collection of interviews like this one, interviews which shed light on the process and inspire.

So, read This Angel on My Chest.  You may think that it's the wrong book for Thanksgiving, but it's not.  It may inspire you to remember all the reasons why you love the ones you do--and to tell them, before it's too late.  It will fill you with gratitude for all sorts of things, from the perfect Spaghetti alla Carbonara to the fact that the heart can expand to love again.

And if you need the recipe for the perfect Spaghetti alla Carbonara, go to Leslie's website.  Her website is another inspiration--all writers' websites should aspire to this kind of web presence.

Traveling with Pomegranates and Other Companions

Greetings from one of the only places on the eastern side of North America that's not under some sort of cold weather warning.  It's chillier than normal with a howling wind, but it could be much worse.

I spent the last few days reading Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor.  It's an interesting joint memoir by a mother and a daughter, each one writing alternate chapters, and it chronicles a time when both of them are at loose ends in terms of what to do next with their lives.

Now you likely know Sue Monk Kidd as the woman who wrote The Secret Life of Bees, but at the time covered by this memoir she has yet to write the book.  She has a desire to be a novelist, but she's doubtful that she can pull it off. She's gone to a writer's conference where she had a famous author dismiss her idea and an agent ask for the manuscript when she writes it.

The two women travel to sacred sites in Greece and France and wrestle with life's big questions.  The mother has just turned 50, while the daughter is in her early 20's, just out of undergraduate school.  They meet interesting people, and they learn interesting history--but what I found most interesting was the process by which Sue Monk Kidd found the courage to write the book that called her name.

She listens to her intuition and offers prayers--both techniques are instrumental to her success.  But she also finds the courage to begin writing, to keep writing, to find a belief in herself.  And it's fascinating to see how the various ideas about Mary and earlier goddess images help her to do that.

If you've been reading this blog, you know that I've been collecting stories of people who come into their own after midlife.  I'm less interested in people in their 20's who find their way--the world is set up for them, although I do remember that time and wouldn't want to go through it again.  No, I want to be assured that it's not too late for me.

I remember falling in love with The Secret Life of Bees and researching Kidd to see what else she had written.  I was puzzled by her spiritual writings and by her unconventional path to fiction publication.  Now I am heartened. 

I must confess, I turned to this book because I really wanted to be reading her latest novel.  I picked up Traveling with Pomegranates as a bargain book when I made an Amazon order.  I thought it sounded interesting, but the price was what persuaded me.

I'm grateful to have traveled with these two women.  I'm grateful for a sense of spirituality that infuses this book.  I'm grateful for its positive messages and its truthful look at the fact that the hard won truths may take time to root in us.  It's not a relentlessly sunny book:  we see these writers wrestle with their fears of aging and death and their feelings of inadequacy.  They don't solve these problems in a page or two.

It's a compelling book for anyone who needs a push to make a change.

How Does Your Light Get In?

I recently read Pat Schneider’s How the Light Gets In: Writing as Spiritual Practice (Oxford University Press, 2013). It’s a wonderful book, full of hope and inspiration that comes from Schneider’s long life of writing and teaching.


She talks about the different ways that writing helps us get to the truths of our lives, with chapters titled to let us know what she’ll be exploring, with labels like “Forgiving,” “The Body,” “Doing Good,” and “Death. Each chapter is full of experiences from Schneider’s own life and those of her family, friends, and students; each chapter ends with a poem by a famous poet. The astute reader will get some ideas for teaching, but the book isn’t primarily about teaching.

The book concerns itself with how to live a good life, and with how various writing practices might help us live better lives. There’s a spiritual component here, but I didn’t find it offensive. I can imagine that Christians of all variations would enjoy it, as would Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and all the adherents of the world’s religions.

Would the spiritual language get in the way of atheist writers? Perhaps.

I found myself scanning some of the autobiographical material. Much of it plumbs painful depths, painful to Schneider, and I just didn’t want to dwell there. In my younger years, I’d have devoured it. But I was able to scan those parts and not lose the thread of the book.

I enjoyed seeing Schneider’s writing process and writing life. We get poems-in-progress, journal entries, all sorts of writing. I enjoyed reading about her publication progress. I also enjoyed reading about her spiritual journeys, especially about the retreats she’s led.

It’s the kind of book that you could read straight through, or just dip in and out as the chapters call out to you. It’s the kind of book that gives comfort and succor. It does what too few books on writing do: it shows writing as part of an integrated life, a life that isn’t afraid of spiritual elements or family duties and joys. It’s worth your time.

Here are some quotes to inspire you:

“The word ‘prayer; evokes strong feelings for many people, depending on past experience—positive for some of us, negative for others. Any other word that I might choose—‘contemplation,’ ‘meditation’—would come with its own set of varying reactions, and so I choose the word that I have used since childhood: prayer. Prayer is, for me, an intentional openness to the presence of mystery in my life. Sometimes it is labor, sometimes ecstatic surprise. Sometimes both.” (p. 10)

“For both the writer and the spiritual pilgrim, an ‘answer’ is not always the greatest gift. Rather, coming to deeper and deeper understanding of the question itself can give us a place to stand in the presence of mystery, in the cloud of unknowing. Answers build walls that sometimes seem protective, bu they may shut out the light.” (p. 64)
“Each of us has a private inner life, and in that life there are secrets that drive us to be who we are. Writing is not the only way for a pilgrim to identify, name, and find his or her way through the dark night of the soul. But writing, I suggest, is where we humans most make our own minds visible to ourselves and to others. There, on the faint lines of our pages, we can take down our masks. Ironically, even when we think we are building masks, creating entirely fictional characters, our very mask-making reveals us. In writing, we see, sometimes with fear and trembling, who we have been, who we really are, and we glimpse now and then who we might become.” (p. 99)

“Sometimes tradition holds us when we cannot hold ourselves.” (p. 101)

“Writing as a spiritual practice sometimes necessitates going where the door is locked and the key has been misplaced. A lot of things may need to be turned over, looked under, opened up, to find the key that will open the door. It is clear to me that I can’t write about forgiving only from the perspective of the one who needs to forgive.” (p. 150)

“If you write the truth, you will change the world. If you write privately, you change your own inner world, and that changes the outer world. If you write publicly, you give voice to what is, and that assists what is becoming. If you help someone else to write the truth, you may not live long enough to know it, but you will have changed the world.” (p. 178-179)

“Elizabeth O’Connor has written that we are not called to our own soul work by ‘ought’ or should.’ Rather, we are called by joy. She says that if we are working out of ought or should, we are not only in the wrong place ourselves; we are blocking someone else whose joy it might be to be where we are.” (p. 264)

Of Time and Tsunamis of All Sorts

--I recently read Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being. What an amazing book! I picked it up because I was after Lionel Shriver's latest book, and Ozeki's was on the shelf too. I knew that my father-in-law was coming for a visit, which meant limited access to computers in the wee, small hours of the morning, so I wanted to make sure I had enough books.

--To think I might have missed this book! Why was I so resistant? After all, I’ve read her other two books, and they were wonderful and amazing. So why, when I read the reviews, had I decided to pass this one by?

--I knew that it was partly comprised of the journal of a teenage girl, and I feel the same way about teenage girl narrators that I do about narrators who are young children: weary and ready to never read another one again. I also don’t often like novels where a journal or letters are the narrative.

--I should have trusted Ozeki. While her teenage narrator has some annoying qualities, they didn’t overwhelm me or make me decide to quit reading. And the book quickly transforms the annoying qualities of the narrator into ways of making us see them as coping strategies.

--I LOVED the other narrator, Ruth, the writer who lives with her husband, Oliver, on a remote island off the coast of Canada.

--The book is full of various artists.  I was taken with Oliver, whose medium is trees, for one project.  He's aware of global warming and the changes the planet is undergoing:  "Oliver wasn't worried.  He took the long view.  Anticipating the effects of global warming on the native trees, he was working to create a climate-change forest on a hundred acres of clear-cut, owned by a botanist friend.  He planted groves of ancient natives--metasequoia, giant sequoia, coast redwoods, Juglans, Ulmus, and ginko--species that had been indigenous to the area during the Eocene Thermal Maximum, some 55 million years ago" (p. 60).

--This book is also about time in all of its facets.  Ruth thinks about narrative as capturing time.  Oliver has a different view of his art:  "This was his latest artwork, a botanical intervention he called the Neo-Eocene.  He described it as a collaboration with time and place, whose outcome neither he nor any of his contemporaries would ever live to witness, but he was okay with not knowing.  Patience was part of his nature, and he accepted his lot as a short-lived mammal, scurrying in and out amid the roots of the giants" (p. 61).

--The book also explores time and technology: 

"Time interacts with attention in funny ways.

At one extreme, when Ruth was gripped by the compulsive mania and hyperfocus of an Internet ssearch, the hours seemed to aggregate and swell llike a wave, swallowing huge chunks of her day.

At the other extreme, when her attention was disengaged and fractured, she experienced time at its most granular, wherein moments hung around like particles, diffused and suspended in standing water" (p. 91).

--Yes, particles and waves.  This is a book that manages to use quantum physics in an approachable way.  I'm in awe of Ozeki's ability to use various sciences in so many interesting ways.

--It's also a book about literal waves.  The 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tsunami are central to this novel.

--Ozeki weaves it all together in interesting ways.  Here Ruth contemplates time, ocean currents, technology, and tsunamis:

"What is the half-life of information?  does its rate of decay correlate with the medium that conveys it?  Pixels need power.  Paper is unstable in fire and flood.  Letters carved in stone are more durable, although not so easily distributed, but inertia can be a good thing.  . . .

Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention? Is the Internet a kind of temporal gyre, sucking up stories like geodrift, into its orbit? . . .

Like plastic confetti, they're drawn into the gyre's becalmed center, the garbage patch of history and time. The gyre's memory is all the stuff that we've forgotten" (p. 114).

--The novel also has a strong spiritual element, with a Buddhist nun as a major character, and a Zen Buddhist philosophy that undergirds much of the novel.  For more on that aspect, see this post on my theology blog.

--And the novel explores World War II in interesting ways.

--I realize that I've thrown out nuggets that might make a casual reader of this blog despair at being able to comprehend the novel.  But Ozeki is more than capable.

--This novel has been short-listed for the Man Booker prize.  It seems to be a good year for that prize.  I read this review of the nominated novels and want to read every one.

--The eternal complaint:  so many books, so little time to read them!

--But don't miss Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being!

A Great Book for Mother's Day--or Any Day

I am late to make this Mother's Day gift suggestion, but I suspect many people out there will wake up today and say, "I completely forgot that Mother's Day is on Sunday.  What should I get?"

Why not get your mother a book of poems for Mother's Day?  Rachel Barenblat's latest collection, Waiting to Unfold, was written during her first year of motherhood, and the book is wonderful.  You can go here to order it in several ways; I recommend ordering directly from the publisher, Phoenicia Publishing, so that more of the proceeds stays with the small publisher and author.  While you're at it, order a copy for yourself.

You may be saying, "But it won't get here in time for Mother's Day."  That's OK.  Revert back to your childhood and make a certificate; that way she'll know that her present is on its way.  My mom is the kind of person who loves stretching out holidays; she'll often save a Christmas present to open Christmas night.  She'd love having a gift certificate that lets her know that a book is coming and then she'd love the anticipation and then she'd love the eventual book.

I'm not a mother, but I know a lot of mothers, and I imagine that this book reminds them of both the joys and the terrors of that first year of motherhood.  But even if we haven't experienced those emotions first hand, the book can speak to us too.

I enjoyed it immensely, probably because it was honest in its exploration of that first year.  Too many chronicles of the first year seem determined to refuse to admit that it's anything but glorious.  Barenblat's poems are rooted in the every day, which includes the not-so-glorious, like a child who doesn't want to sleep, a child who explores the world in a terrifying, head-on, exhilarating way.

It's Barenblat's care given to the depiction of the every day that keeps the poems working so well:  the walk with the stroller that ends in Whole Foods ("Mother Psalm 8"), the box of castaway clothes that are too big and will soon be too small ("Hand-Me-Downs") and the first Thanksgiving, with its memories of other Thanksgivings ("Thanksgiving").

I'm also impressed with Barenblat's abilities as a poet.  She offers poems written in form, like "Newborn Sestina."  Most poems are written in stanzas of the same number of lines, but there is a prose poem here and there.  A series of "Mother Psalms" winds its way throughout the book.

Rachel Barenblat is a Jewish rabbi, so her poems are rooted in her religious practice and religious texts.  But don't let that worry you.  There are plenty of poems that will appeal, even if the reader can't stand any whiff of spirituality.

I found the spiritual undergirding to be one of the best parts of the book, but I am wired that way.  I loved the references to the Biblical Psalms, like this one:  "Your tired tears may endure for the night / But breakfast comes in the morning" ("Mother Psalm 7") which references Psalm 30 ("weeping may stay the night, but joy comes in the morning").  I loved the references to Jewish practices, and even though they're unfamiliar to me, I didn't find the reference to them to be a stumbling block.

Some books about motherhood make me wince and say, "Well, I'm glad I decided not to follow that path."  Some make me second guess my choices.  Barenblat's book gives me a window into that first year in a way that doesn't feel manipulative at all.  But I don't read it dispassionately. 

Barenblat's Velveteen Rabbi blog is one of my favorites, so I don't come to Waiting to Unfold as a person completely unfamiliar with the poet or her baby.  But even if I was completely unfamiliar with Barenblat, I'd still feel like I was reading the poems of a real person, with all the joys and sorrows contained.  I like this book because it doesn't idealize motherhood, the way our culture is inclined to do.  However, it's also not too mired in the messiness of it all.  It's a nice balance of poems.

It's a collection that makes me return to my own life with a sense of wonder.  After all, we've all been children, and most of us have been around children.  I love poems like "Taste," poems that remind us of all the delights in store as we move from thin gruel to other, richer treats.  The book is full of reminders of how much each day has to offer, if we can just slow down to savor them.

So order this book--order several copies.  You probably know multiple people who would enjoy a book like this one.  After all, a poem could be a daily treat--and these poems, which remind us of all the other delights of dailiness, have much to offer.

Let "Unexplained Fevers" Infect You

Here it is April 15.  Income taxes are due, if you haven't yet gotten around to it.  But you don't need me to tell you that.

It's also the halfway point of National Poetry Month.  I haven't done as much to celebrate as I do some years.  I'm not writing a poem a day, as I have in some years.  I haven't read as many new poetry books, as I have in some years.

But the good news:  it's not too late!

If you need a boost to your poetry or a reward for getting through tax day, let me recommend Jeannine Hall Gailey's newest book, Unexplained Fevers, just out from New Binary Press.  A week ago, when we returned from the creativity retreat, the book was waiting.  I consumed it all in one sitting.  Through the week I've gone back to savor it.

Gailey returns to the world of Western fairy tales for inspiration and what enchanting spells of poems she casts from them. We see Red Riding Hood at the car dealership and Sleeping Beauty undergoing an MRI.


Gailey does far more than updating fairy tales into modern situations however. I love the poems where she weaves Biblical imagery with the fairy tale roots. Don't miss "The Princess Becomes a Prophet."  She uses imagery of John the Baptist, and the poem makes me not only want to write poems of my own, but create mixed media creations of the haunting angels that she depicts.

I found myself returning to the poems that used imagery from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," a fairy tale that's haunted me since I first read it as a child.  My favorite:  "The Princess Turns to the Sea."  I love this picture of a mermaid turned human who lives on a northern shore, baking bread for otters, seagulls and rats, swimming with seals in a sea so cold that it turns her skin blue.

Just as fairy tales do, these poems analyze the society in which we're all rooted.  And the poems analyze fairy tales too, along with other pop culture narratives.  In "Advice Left Between the Pages of Grimms' Fairy Tales," we get this piece of advice:  "Forget the sword and the magic stone, / forget enchantments and focus on the profit margin, / the hard line.  Read the subtext."

These lines demonstrate what I most love about Gailey's poems.  I typed those line, and it was the first time I took in the part about the profit margin.  Hmmm.  Are profit margins a different kind of fairy tale?  What does Gaily really mean?  I'll ponder this one off and on all day.

In this way, her poems are both accessible and haunting.  I know that some may object to the term "accessible," but I mean it as the highest compliment.  I could give this book to a reader who claims not to understand poetry, and that reader would be fine.  

But there's much to ponder here.  These are not accessible poems that leave you alone.  I found myself chewing over lines and images long after I first read the poem and understood it.

If you loved her first book, be sure to add this one to your list of must-reads. And if you have yet to discover this wonderful poet, you're in for a treat.

Short Reflections on a Sailing Trip

I've just returned from our annual sailing trip with my sister, her husband, and their child (my one and only young nephew, unlike the nephews from my husband's side of the family, who are grown). I have returned to find a hurricane bearing down on us as we remember hurricane Andrew that wiped out part of South Florida 20 years ago. Oh, yes, and there's more work chaos than usual, which I may blog more about later.


I worry that my life is about to tip from absurdist theatre to full-blown tragedy. Who would be my dramaturge? Will my life be Ibsenesque? Something Arthur Miller-ish? Over the top Tennessee Williams?

But, before I get bogged down in this drama, let me record some of the highlights of my trip.

--When we first started sailing with my sister's family, back when it was just my sister and brother-in-law, sailing was a new experience for me. I'd only been on a sailboat once or twice. It was in an unfamiliar part of the country, the Chesapeake Bay. We didn't always have good weather: hot, humid, breezeless days made me wonder what the appeal could be. But then one day we had perfect weather, and we were hooked.

--Now that we've been sailing every summer for almost 10 years, it feels more like a tradition, like a return to a homeplace.

--Is it an annual event if it happens yearly, but not at the same time each year?  We've more often gone sailing in June, but sometimes as late as September.  We usually luck out with great weather.  A cool front came through Friday night, so thankfully, it was not scorchingly hot.

--We left on Saturday, August 18.  Apparently, everyone else left that day too.  We got to the airport at 5:40 a.m. to find that the security line had already gone to the overflow holding area.  Sigh.

--On the way back, I stood with my arms above my head for the full-body x-ray.  The TSA agent said, "Now do a cartwheel."  It took me a minute to process what he was saying and to realize he was kidding.  In that moment, I thought, I wonder if he'd let me do a round off instead.

--This year we added both crabbing and fishing to our fun activities. We had no luck with fishing. We had phenomenal luck with crabbing. We ate crabs that had been caught an hour earlier: so delicious!

--We also caught a fish in our crab basket. It made me wonder how much food one could catch in a crab basket, a passive hunting, if one had to.

--I thought my 6 year old nephew might object to killing and eating the crabs. On the contrary, he wanted to eat them all. No talk of keeping them as pets; I suspect it's because they're too odd looking.

--I love having a chance to read. This year, I read 3 books that have how-we-live-now themes:

   --The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer: Lysistrata for a modern age!

   --Triburbia by Karl Taro Greenfield: how we live now, if we're artists and fathers and folks at midlife living in Tribeca. Linked short stories!

    --My favorite: True Believers by Kurt Andersen, a novel which shifts between the 60's and the year 2014, with lots of interesting observations about both the past and the present, about our perceptions, about reality and the way popular culture, particularly James Bond, influences us.

--I played Blackjack with my brother-in-law as a dealer. I've never played with a dealer before, just with players betting each other.  I now understand why the house usually wins, but skillful players can make some money.

--I am not one of those skillful players.

--My nephew likes to play card games of all kinds, and he often makes them up as we go along:  "OK, now put down 4 cards, but you can't look at them.  Put three cards in a pile over there.  You can use them.  How many cards do you want me to give you.  OK, now you have to give me 3 cards because my card is higher than yours."  Dizzying.

--I learned a lot more about sailing this year.  This was the first year that I steered the boat.  It was perfect conditions for learning to steer:  very few boats on the bay and fairly calm winds.  I also learned a bit about letting out sails and bringing them in and helped lash the boat to the marina moorings.

--It was good to feel stronger and able to move around quickly enough to help.  It was good to feel my fear of wrecking the boat, but to go ahead, and to realize that catastrophe won't necessarily follow.

--I love the design of sailboats, so elegant, so full of purpose, and so beautiful.

--I saw lots of innovations and wonder why they can't be modified for land.  There are solar panels that are slim and capable of powering a whole boat--and they aren't much larger than your Kindle.  There are tiny propellors that spin in the wind and convert that energy to energy a boat can use. 

--My nephew wears his Spiderman costume often, several times a day.  Sometimes he wears a black cape.  Sometimes he has gloves.  And he has several pairs.  When I think about dressing for the day, it's not too different from adult behavior.  Some times, we need that costume that gives us courage.

--What costume shall give me courage today?

Apocalypse in Poems

I've had Kathleen Flenniken's collection of poems, Plume, on my shelf for several months now.  But it was reading Kristen Iversen's Full Body Burden:  Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flatsthat finally compelled me to read Plume.  Having spent time with Iversen at the Rocky Flats site, I moved to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation with Flenniken.  Both books were powerful.  Flenniken's made me weep.

Maybe it was just the cumulative effect of reading so many apocalyptic narratives in one month, or maybe it was the heartbreak contained in Flenniken's poems.  I started reading in my office on a sleepy July afternoon.  When I got to the suite of poems, "Flow Chart," that present the impact of the death of her best friend's father, I broke down.  Part of my mood was caused by knowledge of so much loss in the atomic age.  Part of it was the cumulative impact of this year that seems to be tinged with so much loss on a personal level (death and lay offs at work, to name a few).  Part of it was the exhaustion of so many extreme weather events in such a short time that make me exhausted for the planet.  However much of the emotional impact on me as a reader came from the power of Flenniken's poetry.

In her review of the book, Jeannine Hall Gailey says, "What might be surprising to readers is how different this book is from Flenniken’ first book, Famous, a book of personal narratives about life in the domestic sphere – a quiet book almost modest in scope. If you enjoyed that book, you might not be really prepared for this second book, which is sweeping in terms of trying to capture a history, personal, political, and scientific. While the personal narrative poems still maintain a steady voice here, they are interwoven with lyric landscapes, fragments of historical documents and redacted government files turned into clever erasures, and meditations on the dangers of scientific hubris. The other difference is a palpable sense of threat, of lives at stake, of a dramatic story unfolding in the poet’s capable hands."

I was surprised by how skillfully Flenniken wove all these fragments together.  Some of the poems are taken from government testimony, while others talk about cancers in heartbreaking new ways.  Many of the poems utilize imagery from the landscape in poems that seem fresh.  Flenniken gives us many an interesting historical fact, while transforming the facts into the poetic.  I'll be haunted by the poem, "Atomic Man," about Harold McCluskey's ordeal when he was exposed to so much radiation during an explosion that he "is considered the most radioactively contaminated human ever to survive" (note on page 66).  She provides several pages of notes, which give interesting background both historical and in terms of how she composed the poems.

Flenniken makes clear the sacrifice demanded by our nuclear obsessions.  Hers is just the latest in a long list of books that make me question the cost and revisit the past.  I'm sure it won't be the last.

Apocalypse in Pairs, Part 2

Earlier this summer, I read a variety of books with an apocalyptic tone.  Those of you who know me will not be surprised--although I usually mix some non-apocalyptic reading in.  I'm surprised I slept at all as June transitioned into July, and I gobbled up apocalyptic book after apocalyptic book.  As I said yesterday, I was surprised to find how much some of them seemed to fit together.  Yesterday's post talked about 2 collections of short stories, and you might not be surprised that I'd link them together.  But in today's post, I'll talk about a surprising pairing, one fiction,  Karen Thompson Walker's The Age of Miracles, and one one non-fiction/memoir, Kristen Iversen's Full Body Burden:  Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats.

Walker's book has probably gotten the most publicity.  It was the glowing review in the New York Times that made me request it from the public library.  In this book, the rotation of the Earth slows, at first imperceptibly and then humans experience multiple extra hours in the day.  Yet sixth grade must go on!

I was much more interested in the larger context of the book than in the narrative arc of the 6th grade girl, Julia, who narrates the book.  At first I thought, how wonderful to have extra time in the day.  But the book makes clear that it's actually a curse which will likely mean the end of humans on the planet.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I disliked the narrator.  In fact, I find myself intrigued by the narrator's experiences with the boy she likes and with her parents.  But reading about the pecking orders changing amongst the children bored me rather quickly.  This narrator lacks the pluckiness of a young narrator like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird.  I wanted her to buck up more quickly than she did.

Likewise, I found myself much more interested in the family life of Iversen than in her childhood experiences with boys.  As a narrator, I found Iversen much more compelling than Julia.  But more compelling still was the larger story that Iversen tells.

Iversen places her personal narrative inside a larger history of life in the early decades of the post-World War II nuclear age in America.  She does a beautiful job of explaining the science.  She ranks right up there with Terry Tempest Williams for showing how family and history and the land all intertwine, and like Williams, she's got some lyrical gorgeousness in her writing.  Consider this example:  "The body is an organ of memory, holding traces of all our experiences.  The land, too, carries the burden of all its changes.  To truly see and understand a landscape is to see its depth as well as its smooth surfaces, its beauty and its scars" (page 338).

I first heard of this book when Iversen was interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air, a wonderful interview that you can access here, along with other highlights from both the interview and the book.  If you don't have time to read the book, make sure to make time for the interview.

But I read the book in a week-end--it's that compelling and readable.  Likewise, I read The Age of Miracles in a day because I wanted to find out what happened.  But Full Body Burden will stay with me and haunt me much longer.

Apocalypse in Pairs Part 1

As I was reading Colson Whitehead's Zone One, I often wondered if he was trying to do too much, if his material would work better as a short story.  The first story in Maureen F. McHugh's After the Apocalypse shows how well zombies can work as short story material.  I must say, though, it's not one of my favorites of her book of mostly perfect stories.

I don't often read short stories, unless it's a book of linked short stories.  I'm still in awe of what Jennifer Egan did with A Visit from the Goon Squad.  But much as I like teaching the short story, much as I like writing it, I don't always like reading my way through a collection.  Occasionally I read such great reviews that I search out a collection.

I read In-Flight Entertainment by Helen Simpson.  It got dazzling reviews.  It was a slim book.  It seemed to have a bit of an apocalypse theme.  I decided to give it a chance. 

Alas, I didn't like most of the stories.  They were just too slender.  My brain has returned to "Diary of an Interesting Year" again and again.  It's a story set in the near future, as environmental problems have escalated.  A family feels more and more besieged in their home and they set out looking for someplace better.  Their lives get progressively more horrible.

Note to self:  in event of apocalypse, shelter in place.  And save the bullets.  Marauders will come, and you will need them.

McHugh's stories make a similar point.  "After the Apocalypse" shows the hazards of being a woman on the road.  The main character in "Useless Things" does much better by staying in her New Mexico house, even though she can't afford to travel to see her mother in the midwest. 

My brain came back to "Useless Things" many times in the weeks since I've read it.  I loved the story of an artist making her way through hard times.  I loved the ways that it showed that tough times can change us into someone we'd prefer not to be, even though it grieved me to be reminded of that.

With its details of dwindling water, the possibility of this story doesn't seem so far away.  "Special Economics," on the other hand, feels both like a journalistic expose of working conditions in Asia right now and of something completely made up.  The story shows how easy it is to get trapped into modern slavery.  The plucky girls keep us from getting too bogged down in despair.

"The Lost Boy:  A Reporter at Large" is told in a journalistic style, which reminds me of how many ways that a short story writer can play, in ways a novelist cannot.

The other stories didn't stay with me, although they captured my attention as I read them.  This collection is one that I'd like to read again and again.  I'm sure there were things I missed.  I'm sure I'd notice ways that the stories intersected.

But the main reason I'd like to read them again is that McHugh is such a talented writer that the stories are a joy to read.  They're well developed, unlike Helen Simpson's.   It makes me wonder how one collection gets chosen to be heralded, while the other slips by unnoticed.  They've both got merit, and readers would be out there for both.  But for those who want a full-blown apocalypse, Maureen F. McHugh offers a special treat.

Apocalyptic Book Report

Earlier this summer, I read Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, an apocalyptic novel where the end of the world comes in the form of a plague which turns people into zombies. In some ways, it’s less a novel than an elegy for all we’ve lost, even though we haven’t lost it yet.


The novel takes place some time after the plague, when the worst appears to be over, when the survivors are trying to clean up New York City. The heavy-duty work has been done, but there are still stragglers, zombies who seem stuck in some moment in their old lives: the man fixing the copy machine, the vitamin store stocker of shelves, the psychiatrist waiting for her next patient who is very late.

Along the way there’s some meditation about what makes these “people” return to a certain moment in their lives. Why spend eternity tending the fry basket? Is it some moment that spoke to them in a certain way, a seminal moment or a moment of sameness? Who can say?

The non-infected are also haunted by the past, by tokens of pre-plague life that they find and discuss. They’re haunted by the future, too. Will it be just like the past? Even now, is there someone writing a TV show that will take place in plague times, turn the zombies into comic foils?

In the end, it’s all illusion, of course, illusion of all different sorts, and the novel talks about all the ways we delude ourselves, during zombie invasions and during normal times. The zombies are a fitting metaphor for all the ways that life consumes us: there are lots of ways to be chewed up and spat out, and the book returns again and again to this metaphor of consumption.

I’ve talked before about the zombie invasion we seem to be seeing in popular culture. What does it signify?

I love the title of Nina Auerbach’s book Our Vampires, Ourselves, and its central premise that we can tell much about our culture by the vampires that we create. For decades we didn’t see many zombies, and now we do.

Are pop culture creators pondering the pace of modern life which makes so many of us feel like zombies? Do we feel consumed by some plague which turns us into shaky monstrosities of our former selves? Are we so haunted by Alzheimer’s disease that we create zombies so that we can talk about what it means to be not-human while still inhabiting a human body?

During the age of AIDS, before protease inhibitors bought so many people so much more time, we saw lots of pop culture vampires. In this information, high-tech age, we see low tech zombies. Hmm.

Tomorrow:  Apocalypse in Pairs:  Part 1--the short stories (including one with zombies!)

Apocalyptic Reading

My inner (but never subsumed!) apocalypse girl has been directing the reading choices lately.  I started the week-end of our sailboat non-purchase in Jacksonville by reading Hilma Wolitzer's An Available Man.  On its face, it's not a novel of apocalypse.  Societies  do not collapse, nothing goes awry on a global scale.  But it is a story about a man who loses his wife to cancer.  He's not that old, but the horrors of dating again seem both poignant and apocalyptic to me.

Many times I was tempted to quit reading.  It reminded me of those books I loved as an adolescent:  folks living in the orbit of New York City who apparently have gobs of money but we don't see them work much.  How do they afford these vacations in the Hamptons?  When I was young, I assumed my grown up life would be just this way.  So far, not exactly.

From that book, which I zoomed through in just a few hours, I read Helen Simpson's In-Flight Entertainment.  It's a collection of short stories, most of them extremely short.  Many of them had an explicit apocalyptic theme, while all of them had a foreboding kind of tone, even if societal collapse wasn't imminent.  The story from which the collection takes its title deals with global warming and the implications of air travel across the globe.  "Diary of an Interesting Year" terrified me in the same way the nuclear war movies of my adolescence did.  It made me think of regular life and what would be lost if the glacial shelf collapsed, and water overtook the world.  It made me think of how life would be particularly difficult in a female body.  It made me want to get serious about target practice and use of a gun.

I'm currently reading Colson Whitehead's Zone One, a zombie apocalypse kind of book.  But along the way, there's lots of musing about life just before the zombie apocalypse (our current day) and life in the 1970's.  It, too, deals with the myth of New York City, but in such a different way than Wolitzer does.  Whitehead realizes that there are many myths of New York City, and he deftly weaves them together.

Of course, I can't read nothing but apocalypse.  I also read The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can Exercise Better, Train Smarter, Live Longer by Gretchen Reynolds.  I love its premise, that maybe we don't need to do some of the impossible sounding activities we've been told we must do to be healthy.  Now, to lose much weight, yes, we may need to make a more strenuous effort.  But to improve our health actually takes very little, in terms of exertion that hurts.  If you go here, you can find links to two delightful interviews that aired on NPR, plus you can read an excerpt.

I also scanned Dr. Andrew Weil's Spontaneous Happiness, which didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, but it's good to be reminded of the importance of fighting against a doomed outlook, which is one of the risks of descending into apocalyptic reading.  Weil gives all sorts of suggestions and concludes the book with an 8 week program for moving toward emotional health. 

How I miss the summers of my youth, where I had long days to lose myself in good books.  But I'll take the smaller scraps of time, even while longing for whole weeks or months.