Remains of the Day: book review

Showing posts with label book review. Show all posts

Friday, January 19, 2024

Book Stack ~ December 2023 ~ And an Announcement

First, the announcement:

After 16+ years of posting here, I've decided to retire this blog. Part of me wants to write a long post about what I've learned and what it's meant to me and why I've decided to move on, but instead I think I'll just make a clean break of it and leave it at thank you for coming here for as many of those 16 years as you have, to read what I have to say. You can visit me at www.andrealani.com, where I'll post regular updates about publication news and upcoming events. You can also subscribe to my newsletter, which goes out once a month and includes a short essay and news, and which from now on will include a regular "now reading" section to take the place of these Book Stack posts. Now, without further ado, here's December's reading list.

Now, the book stack:

A monthly post about what I've been reading.

January 2023
February 2023
March 2023

Fiction

December's fiction reads had were vintage and seasonally appropriate mysteries. I was in the mood for comforting, classical mysteries and found Monk's Hood, a Brother Cadfael mystery by Ellis Peters, and Strong Poison, the first Harriet Vane mystery by Dorothy L. Sayers during a recent used bookstore visit. Coincidentally they both take place during the Christmas season, although neither has a strong holiday theme to them. They both delivered in the classic, entertaining whodunnit and cozy escapism departments. At another used bookstore, I picked up In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer Fleming. This one was on a seasonal display and therefore a more seasonally intentional choice. I don't always love police procedurals, but I enjoyed this one and will probably be on the lookout for more in the series.

Nonfiction

I picked up a copy of Elizabeth Tova Bailey's The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating for a friend who was going to be going through a medical treatment that would leave her convalescing for a long while. I thought she would find comfort in Bailey's quiet contemplation of a pet snail that found its way accidentally into her home and heart while she was undergoing a long period of illness caused by a virus (similar to some people's experiences of long covid). I'd read the book some years ago and decided to read it again before I passed it on to my friend. I love all the snail literature and lore she includes and the surprising companionship the minute creature brings to Bailey.

I also read Susan Hand Shetterly's latest collection of nature essays, Notes on the Landscape of Home. It's a lovely little book--I always enjoy Shetterly's quiet and wise way of contemplating the world, our place in it, and the changes that it's undergoing due to climate change, development, etc.

Finally, I finished these two monsters: A Nature Poem for Every Day of the Year and Nature Writing for Every Day of the Year, edited by Jane MacMorland Hunter. I read the day's entry from each book almost every morning before I got started on the day. I'd started reading them in January of 2022, but gave up after missing too many days and not being able to catch up. This time, if I missed a day, I sometimes read it the next day and sometimes let it go. So there are a few entries from both books I didn't read--including most of July--but in the interest of avoiding an all-or-nothing attitude, I'm calling them read (and may catch up on July next year). Because they come from a British editor and publisher, they lean heavily toward British writers, with a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries, although there are some that go back as far as Pliny the Elder and a few contemporary writers thrown in. Like most collections of nature writing, both books lean heavily white male, although the ratio of women writers is higher than in many such collections. I also appreciate that the Nature Writing book includes a fair amount of fiction, some of it from surprising places (what you might not, on first glance, consider nature writing). So overall I enjoyed both books, was introduced to some new writers and reminded of some old favorites, and I enjoyed having the ritual of reading a poem and a short excerpt each morning. I need to find something to replace them with. (I also have a book from the series called a Nature Poem for Every Night of the Year, but I haven't yet gotten into the habit of reading from it before I go to bed.)

Scrolling back through all of my Book Stack posts, I estimate that I read 83 books during 2023. I didn't make much of a dent in the book stack, though, since many (most) were new acquisitions. (I'm going to keep working at whittling down that stack--which is now housed on book shelves and therefore less ominous looking--in 2024.) I was going to say which were my favorites, but looking back over the stacks, I see so many that I loved for different reasons, or, even if I didn't love them, I appreciated something about them. I suppose the Demon Copperhead-David Copperfield pairing was pretty close to the top of the list.

Be well, friends. Hope to see you in other spaces (website, newsletter, instagram, real life). And reading in 2024!

Friday, December 8, 2023

Book Stack ~ November 2023

A monthly post about what I've been reading.

January 2023
February 2023
March 2023

My reading this month was a little all over the place--representing my literary split personality. Starting from the bottom of the stack:

Nonfiction

If you swim at all in the sea of memoir writing, one of the books that gets referenced most frequently is Andre Dubus III's memoir Townie. I finally picked it up and gave it a read last month (and, if I'm being honest, which is what memoir requires, bleeding a little into this month). Man, it's a brutal book. So hard to read. I don't, of course, mean the writing, but the experiences of violence and neglect Dubus went through as a child and the violence he participated in as he got older and took on an almost pathological role of defending himself and the people he cared about. I was so mad at his parents, who didn't abuse or hurt their children, but who just did not do what they needed to to make sure they were safe and taken care of--his mom mostly because she was exhausted from working all the time to keep them housed and semi-fed, and his dad because he put his needs--writing, running, and dating college students--ahead of his family. I was also so mad at our society for creating the conditions where so many families fall into circumstances where they can barely survive. It is, ultimately, a triumphant story about overcoming adversity and one's own worst instincts, but it truly takes an extraordinary individual (like Dubus and his siblings) to survive let alone thrive after such an upbringing (many of the other characters in the book, raised in the same chaotic milieu as Dubus do not survive).

On a totally different note, I read Read Books All Day and Get Paid for It by Jennie Nash, which is all about running a book coaching business, something I've been pursuing incrementally over the last couple of years.

Fiction

My sister sent me The Hike by Lucy Clarke, a thriller about four women on a four-day hike through the wilds of Norway that goes horribly wrong. Our day-after-Thanksgiving plans fell through, and so I spent a lot of that day reading, nearly finishing the book in one day. It was a fun read, with a good plot twist, and some interesting characters, each struggling with her own circumstances and her relationship to her friends.

And, of course, I read some Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels. First, I found Legend in Green Velvet, the last book I needed for my collection, at a used bookstore I popped into on a trip to Portland. It's a totally fun and slightly ridiculous caper through the Scottish countryside (similar in vibe to The Camelot Caper/Her Cousin John). Then, because I was working with a friend on the beginnings of a novel she's writing that revolves around antiquarian bookselling, I pulled Houses of Stone off the shelf, because it has an antiquarian books element, and I was curious to see how the great Barbara Michaels made the subject into a thriller. The book doesn't disappoint, with all kinds of gothic elements and quirky characters and a really long chapter that takes place at an estate auction. Finally, I reread Search the Shadows, mainly, I think, because I needed a soothing antidote to Townie. This was the first Michaels/Peters book I read, way back in high school, and it's one of my faves--again, gothic elements, plus Egyptology. Love it!

Friday, November 17, 2023

Book Stack ~ October 2023

A monthly post about what I've been reading.

My books-per-month rate went way down between September and October, in part because I didn't have another week away at a residency and in (larger) part because I spent a lot of time binge-watching Ugly Betty. But somehow I managed to read three new releases, a possibly unprecedented occurrence.

Fiction

At the beginning of October, I participated in a book fair, and the author whose booth was next to mine was Rebecca Turkewitz, with her debut short story collection, Here in the Night, a delightful melange of spooky tales, which in an uncharacteristic move, I actually read soon after coming home with it. If you love short stories, you'll love this book. If short stories leave you vaguely unsatisfied, pick up this book--every single one hits that elusive short story sweet spot.

I also read one more Mary Stewart, Rose Cottage, which was a nice, pleasant read but not very suspenseful--there's a sense of something amiss when the main character returns home to clean out her grandmother's cottage, but it ends up going in a very different direction than Stewart's suspense stories.

Nonfiction

I had the good fortune of attending a reading by my friend Melanie Brooks of her new memoir A Hard Silence in early October (and, again, read the book right away--perhaps I'm turning over a new leaf and no longer hoarding books before I get around to reading them!). It's about the corrosive nature of secrets--specifically the secret her family harbored for years about her father's HIV diagnosis, because of their (very rational) fear of the stigma they would experience. It's a heartfelt, moving, loving, beautifully crafted book.

Finally, I read Soil, by Camille Dungy, a gorgeous book (inside and out--I mean, look at that cover!!!) about turning a suburban lawn into a wildflower paradise, parenting during the pandemic, contending with nearby wildfires and other signs of climate change, grappling with systemic racism and the colonial history of agriculture, nomenclature, and taxonomy, writing about nature from a perspective other than the Lone White Male, and lovingly tending the land. I admire it so much, and it made me want to get my hands dirty, even though I'm the world's laziest garden (I really love that Dungy's primary garden focus is flowers--vegetables are secondary!).

Friday, October 20, 2023

Book Stack ~ September 2023

A monthly post about what I've been reading.

I started the month with a week away at an artist residency, and I read so many books while I was there.

My big goal for the residency was to figure out if I still have the interest and motivation to work on a project that I've been thinking about and nibbling at over the course of nearly two decades, which is to put together a compilation of writing and biographies of women who write/wrote about motherhood and nature. So several of these were books I'd collected over the years in hopes of finding writing that would be applicable to this project and either hadn't read, hadn't finished reading, or had read in a different context. These were:

Linea Nigra by Jazmina Barrera, a diary-style accounting of pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding, with a lot of literature and art intertwined as well as earthquakes.

My Garden Book by Jamaica Kincaid, a collection of essays about gardening, plants, and colonialism.

Parrot's Wood,= by Erma Fisk, an amusing and grueling account of a month in primitive conditions at a bird refuge in Costa Rica by a retired woman who got involved in ornithology and bird conservation after the untimely death of her husband.

The Curve of Time by M Wylie Blanchet, charming and often harrowing tales of navigating the coast of British Columbia in a small boat with five children after the death of the author's husband.

Shaped by Wind and Water by Anne Haymond Zwinger, reflections on a life of nature writing from a week at an artist residency.

The Natural World of Louise Dickinson Rich, a three-part account of the author's life in three zones of New England: the Piedmont of Massachusetts, the North Woods of Maine, and the coast of Maine.

I also had time for fun reading and kept going on my Mary Stewart streak, with My Brother Michael and Nine Coaches Waiting, both fantastic examples of the romantic suspense genre, as well as The Wind Off The Small Isles, which had a great setup and then sort of fizzled for me. I guess it's good to know that even a supremely talented writer sometimes swings and misses.

When I returned home, I read Rooted 2: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction, an anthology in which my essay "Faith in a Seed" appears, which was edited by Josh MacIvor Anderson and came out from Outpost19 books this summer.

I admit to not always being a good literary citizen when it comes to reading the words that share pages with mine in an anthology or journal, but I read this book cover-to-cover and it is filled with beautiful and brilliant essays about trees. I would highly recommend it even if I wasn't featured inside.

Finally, in what is becoming a September tradition, I listened to the audiobook of the newest Richard Osman, The Last Devil to Die, and then I re-listened to the earlier volumes and then the new one all over again. I love these books. They're smart and funny and clever.

But I've had a couple people tell me they couldn't get into them (one as a reader and one as a listener) and that they got confused by the number of different characters and points of view. So, be warned about that. I've also been binge-listening to the Maintenance Phase podcast, which has made me much more aware of and sensitive to anti-fat bias and weight stigma, and so listening this time around, especially to the first book, I felt a little cringey about the way the detective Chris thinks of his own weight and the way his side-kick Donna nudges him toward using the stairs and not eating junk food. So be warned, these books aren't for everyone (then again, what book is?).

Friday, September 22, 2023

Book Stack ~ August 2023

A monthly post about what I've been reading.

Usually I take a photo of the books I read on the last day of the month, so that even if I don't get around to posting about them for another three weeks, I at least know what they were. This time I forgot to do that and had to recreate the stack! Luckily I hadn't gotten around to putting/giving them away so I'm pretty sure this list is accurate.

After reading some heavy stuff about the former Yugoslavia in July, I had gotten onto a Mary Stewart kick for something light. I continued that streak into August with Madam Will You Talk, a fun and suspenseful romp through the French countryside (and the second of her books that I've read recently which not only relies heavily on characters smoking to give them something to do while they converse--to avoid talking head syndrome--but also to provide a significant clue to solving the mystery. Interesting how dated that device is now!). I also read The Stormy Petrel, which had such a great setup--a remote Scottish Island, two mysterious men appearing out of nowhere into the narrator's life (and cottage), and a whole bird-watching sub-plot, but I felt like she wrapped up the mystery too quickly and neatly, and while I support the instinct of using the rest of the book to resolve a conservation/land development/bird protection issue, it didn't make for suspenseful, or even all that interesting, reading.

Back in the romantic suspense/romp through the countryside vein, I re-read (probably re-re-re-re-read) Elizabeth Peters's Her Cousin John, which has an alternate title in some editions of The Camelot Caper, because I'm interested in the caper as a genre (sub-genre?) and most suggested titles in articles about the style are by dudes. It's an entertaining and amusing book, and as a bonus it introduces a character who becomes a staple in the later Vicky Bliss series. I even found a scholarly article about it, which I also found entertaining, both the fact that someone wrote it and the article itself.

In a more serious but still thoroughly enjoyable vein, I read Hotel Cuba, the new novel by my friend and mentor Aaron Hamburger. It's based on the story of his grandmother's experience of emigrating from Eastern Europe to America via Cuba in the 1920s, when the US was not exactly welcoming of Jewish immigrants. Such an interesting peek into a slice of history.

In the nonfiction realm, I read Christian Cooper's Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a black Man in the Natural World, which delves into science fiction, growing up gay, Black, and nerdy, writing comics, traveling the world, and, of course, bird watching and the notorious events of the day on which a white woman decided to call the police on him for birding-while-Black, coincidentally on the same day George Floyd was murdered by white police officers. Fortunately Cooper came out of the incident intact and has since gone on to host a National Geographic program and do other great things around birding and social justice, as well as write this book, which is super engaging.

And, finally, I finished reading Elizabeth George's first craft book Write Away, which gives very useful advice for crafting a novel in general (not just a crime novel), the most useful of which is:

You will be published if you possess...talent, passion, and discipline.

You will probably be published if you possess...either talent and discipline or passion and discipline.

You will likely be published if you possess neither talent nor passion but still have discipline....

But if all you possess is talent or passion, if all you possess is talent and passion, you will not be published.

Which is to say, sit your butt down and get to work!

Friday, August 18, 2023

Book Stack ~ July 2023

A monthly post about what I've been reading.

Vacation Reads

Before we left on our trip to Slovenia and Croatia, I searched online for "books that take place in the Balkans" and came up with the first two on the list (as well as two from last month's list).

The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obrecht. This book tells the story of a woman doctor from an unnamed city (presumably Belgrade) who travels to a coastal town in another of the former Balkan republics (also not named) to provide medical care in an orphanage. While she's there, she learns that her grandfather had gone away to a clinic and died, without telling his wife or daughter the truth about his medical condition (cancer) or where he's going. The narrator intertwines her experiences at the orphanage, including trying to help a group of Roma who are digging in the nearby vineyard for mysterious reasons, with stories of visiting the tiger house at the zoo with her grandfather as a child and then delving further back into stories of her grandfather's childhood and the escaped tiger that takes up residence near his village, and magical realism and folkloric elements become part of the narrative. It's a strange and beautiful book.

Mix Ex-Yugoslavia by Sofija Sefanovic. This memoir begins with the narrator taking part in a Miss Ex-Yugoslavia beauty pageant among the former Yugoslav ex-pat community in Australia and from there winds back through her childhood growing up in Belgrade and her family's emigration to Australia as tensions in that country rose in anticipation of war of the 1990s. While Stefanic didn't experience the war first-hand, it's still an insightful account of the experience of someone intimately tied to the place and a different perspective on NATO's role in ending that war--different from our own US roaring in as saviors story, and the collateral damage the wars had on the people living in Serbia who did not support Milošević or the ethnic cleansing.

In Croatia I visited a bookstore (okay, in both Slovenia and Croatia I visited a LOT of bookstores) and picked up the following three works in translation:

Take Six: Six Balkan Women Writers, edited by Will Firth. This collection includes stories, excerpts, and essays from six women writers who hail from six different Balkan republics. It differs from the previous two books, as well as The Hired Man, which I read last month, in that most of the stories don't focus on war. Rather, in a variety of writing styles, they delve into different aspects of everyday life of modern people, both tragic (drug use and death) and ordinary (falling in love), including a series of humorous stories that take place in ride shares and memoir vignettes by a teenager in a tuberculosis ward.

In a Sentimental Mood by Ivana Bodrožić and Kindness Separates Night from Day by Marija Dejanović are both books of poetry translated from Croatian into English. I'm not a great poetry critic, but I enjoyed them both, especially Kindness.

When I got home, I immediately came down with a cold and spent three days lying around hydrating and not moving much, so I craved comfort reads and picked up a couple of vintage Mary Stewart volumes I'd ordered recently. Both Touch Not the Cat and The Gabriel Hounds have good gothic vibes, and The Gabriel Hounds has my other favorite suspense trope: travel to an exotic location (the desert of Lybia). They both also lean heavy on a trope favored by both Mary Stewart and my other suspense writer fave, Barbara Michaels: kissing cousins. The Gabriel Hounds is extra-squirmy, since the cousins' fathers are identical twins, which makes them, genetically, half-siblings. I don't know what it is with these authors, but they loved keeping it in the family. Is the ick factor of this a recent development in society and cousins getting together just no big deal in the sixties and seventies?

Friday, July 14, 2023

Book Stack ~ June 2023

A monthly post about what I've been reading.

I started this month with a couple of fun mysteries by JS Borthwick, a writer I'd never heard of--despiete her having been a Maine writer--until I ran across her works in a used bookstore. I read her first and third installment of her Sarah Dean series. They're pretty entertaining, in the traditional mystery style, with some humor mixed in. I especially liked The Case of the Hook-Billed Kites, because it has a bird-watching theme, although I admit to getting confused by the many many characters. The Student Body was amusing because of the college that's a thinly veiled fictionalization of one of Maine's elite schools.

After that, I moved onto books related to our summer trip to Slovenia and Croatia. The first was The Hired Man, by Aminatta Forna, a novel follows the story of a man in a remote Croation town, who hires on to help restore the nearby abandoned house that a woman from England and her two teenage children move into. As he repairs the house and helps the daughter bring to life a covered mosaic, he revisits in his mind his childhood and young adulthood, recounting a friendship with the two children who lived next door and how one of those relationships blossomed and the other deteriorated. It has the tightly wound suspense of a mystery, as we sense that something very bad happened, but we don't know what or why.

I admit to not reading all 1,000 pages of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, the classic travel account of Yugoslavia by Rebecca West, written in 1937. But I did read the parts relevant to our vacation, or a little less than 300 pages. It's a fascinating account of the region's history, people, and landscape. Maybe I'll read the rest when I get home.

Finally, I read Rick Steves' Europe 101: History & Art for the Traveler, by Rick Steves and Gene Openshaw. I took two semesters of Western Civilization in college, but that was a lot of years ago, and not a whole lot of what I'd learned stuck to the old gray cells, and I never took the opportunity to take Art History. So reading this book was both a great refresher and an introduction to art and architecture about which I only had a glancing knowledge. It's also laced with dorky but amusing dad jokes (eg., they call the Medieval dread with which the end of the 10th century was approached "Y1K." Har har.). It inspired me to want to visit a LOT more of Europe, where much of the continent's art and architecture are housed. Gotta keep on traveling.

Friday, June 16, 2023

Book Stack ~ May 2023

A monthly post about what I've been reading.

I had a lot going on in May, so it was a kind of light reading month, especially toward the second half.

Fiction

I picked up What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman at a used bookstore, and I really liked it. It's about the disappearance of two little girls about 20 or so years in the past, told from multiple points of view and shifting back-and-forth between the present and the time of the disappearance, with lots of unreliable narrators along the way. Her style reminded me a bit of Elizabeth George (see below). I'll be looking for more of her books in the future.

Speaking of Elizabeth George, I read her first book, A Great Deliverance, which introduces her detective duo, Inspecter Linley and Sgt. Havers, and also introduces her style of multiple points of view. It's clearly not as strong as her future books, in terms of the character motivation and development and maintaining POV, but I like seeing how authors develop.

Finally, a book that was truly on my book stack, Jennifer Weiner's Then Came You. The premise of this book is what would happen if the egg donor, surrogate, and older sister and future mother of a baby conceived and born through egg donation, in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy were to all meet. The plot that gets them together is somewhat convoluted, and the ending is tied up in a bit too neat of a bow for my taste, but it was an entertaining story that gave a lot to think about with regard to unusual family structures.

Nonfiction

The first book (which is the bottom book), was actually from April, but missed the photo shoot for last month's post. Trusting the River by Jean Aspen follows Aspen and her husband around the US as they travel, meet up with friends and family, and try to figure out what they want their retirement to look like. It's a book about aging, planning, looking back over a long and full life, and enduring terrible loss. I'd read both of Aspen's previous books, Arctic Daughter and Arctic Son about her times in the Alaska wilderness as a young woman and, later, with her second husband and their young son. And I recently discovered her and her husband's documentaries, Arctic Son and Rewilding Kernwood, the first about building their magical homestead in Alaska and the second about restoring it to its natural condition after the loss of their son and the realization that they were getting older and would be unable to maintain it, while meanwhile encroachment on the wilderness by hunters was making the home vulnerable to vandalism. I really admired Aspen's wisdom in both documentaries and was excited to find she'd written another book. The book is lovely and gives a lot to think about, and fills in a lot of the narrative around her life before and after the other two books. I also think it could have benefitted from a good editor, as it meandered a lot. Still, I enjoyed reading about the full trajectory of a fascinating life and I appreciated the intention with which Jean and her husband approached their later years.

Finally, I don't often pick up a book as soon as I hear about it, but after listening to two interviews with Mary Louise Kelly on NPR, I grabbed a copy of It. Goes. So. Fast., about the senior year of her oldest son. The book begins with the realization that this is her last chance to be there for her kids, after years of having to make sacrifices in favor of being an international correspondent and news anchor on All Things Considered. Few motherhood memoirs encompass the teenage years, so I appreciated Kelly going there, and I really appreciated her honesty and her laying bare the challenges she has faced as a mom over the years. It's brave for anyone to do that, but especially so for a public figure. I also love the new life philosophy I got from the book, to whit: "Why should things be easy when they can be difficult?" Amen, sister.

Friday, May 5, 2023

Book Stack ~ April 2023

A monthly post about what I've been reading.

January 2023

February 2023

March 2023

In April I applied myself to reading books actually in my actual Book Stack--ones that I didn't buy recently and that I haven't read before. I have hopes of finally clearing my bedroom floor of books this year!

Nonfiction

I usually read everything by Terry Tempest Williams as soon as it comes out, but Finding Beauty in a Broken World was published in 2008, when I was elbow-deep in mothering little kids and not in the right frame of mind for a book that I knew was largely about the aftermath Rwandan genocide. I picked up a copy at a used bookstore sometime in the last year or two (one that had been signed by the author!), and when I started getting delving into mosaics I decided to pick it up at last. The book begins with Williams taking a traditional mosaic workshop in Ravenna, Italy. From there it travels to a prairie dog colony in Utah and then to a survivors' village in Rwanda. I won't be able to explain well how these disparate elements are connected, but there's the metaphor of creating beautiful art from shattered pieces runs through the book, and in the village in Rwanda, Williams participates in a project of building a memorial that is covered in mosaic designs. There's also the ecological concept of a mosaic landscape, where different natural communities are patched together, creating varied and heterogenous habitats. There's also the basic inhumanity and barbarism required to both extirpate an entire species (or several species), like the prairie dog out of irrational animus, and how that is amplified in the extermination of a whole class of people (as in genocide). It is a heavy book, I'm not going to lie, but it's a beautiful one, as all of Williams' books are.

In a totally different vein, The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks was a required read for the book coaching training that I've been dragging out to a ridiculous degree. I really resonated with the initial idea that Hendricks puts forth, that we humans are uncomfortable with good feelings (out of a history of waiting for the next shoe to drop, or the next saber-toothed tiger to eat us), and so we sabotage ourselves with worry, deflecting, picking fights, etc. This gets in the way of our leveling up to our best selves (which Hendricks hyperbolically calls our Zone of Genius). So I've been working on letting myself feel good when things are going well. The rest of the book kind of proves the point put forth by the If Books Could Kill podcast, that most self-help books are mostly filler and fluff. There's a section on "Einstein time," which has something to do with thinking of time as elastic by not worrying or complaining about it anymore, and suddenly you'll have all the time you need...or something. He then contradicts this whole perspective with an anecdote about firing an employee who was late for picking him up at the airport (I mean, she was just on Einstein time, right? Also, why wouldn't you call a cab instead of expecting an employee to pick you up?). But still I'd say the book was worth the short time it took to read it for the change of mindset it engendered around allowing myself to feel good about things going well.

Finally, I finished reading a book I started about two or three years ago, having borrowed it from a friend, and stopped about 2/3 of the way through: When Women Ruled the World by Kara Cooney. It's about six women "rulers" of Egypt, over its whole long history. I'd thought, from the title, that it would be an empowering read, but as it turns out, these women who rose to prominence, either as regents for their sons or other young relatives or as women pharaohs (like Hatshepsut), were only able to obtain their power through strictures established by men and their personal power did not translate to more power for women generally. Also, there were only six of them over nearly 3,000 years. I realize it's kind of a "well, duh" to note that women who rise to heights of power are as vested in and obligated to uphold the patriarchy as the men who precede and succeed them. But reading about one after another of these women was a little discouraging (like watching an episode of The Crown, where, yeah, sure Elizabeth is queen, but everything she does is tightly controlled by a roomful of old white men with gray hair). So I got discouraged and quit, but I finally picked it up and was a little bolstered at the end by Cleopatra's story, which I didn't know much about. Yeah, sure she and her children died tragically in the end, but she was a bad*ss, and she managed to insinuate herself into the head of Egypt and manipulated both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony to hold Rome at bay (and it was those men's hubris, and their rivalry with other Roman leaders that brought them, and eventually her, down). And, of course, she was maligned by everyone ever since for daring to be a powerful woman (does anything every change?).

Fiction

For fiction I read two books I picked up last time I visited my MFA alma mater, both written by faculty of the program.

First up, Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand, a mystery that takes place on an island in Maine, with the heroine, Cass Neary, a former photographer who's hit rock bottom and is sent to Maine to interview a recluse photographer, where she runs into all kinds of trouble--missing children, weird artwork, suspicious locals. It's a lot darker than the mysteries I usually read, but it was fun and entertaining and creepy.

Second, I read Make a Wish But Not for Money by one of my favorite mentors, Suzanne Strempek Shea. It's about a woman who loses her job in a bank during one of our recent recessions and takes up palm reading in a burnt-out mall, discovering she has a special--metaphysical--talent for it. Her palm readings begin to bring the mall back to life, which in turn causes its own cascade of problems. It's a fun, humorous, and heart-ful take on love, friendship, and the socio-economics of the mall effect on Main Street.

Friday, April 14, 2023

Book Stack ~ March 2023

A monthly post about what I've been reading.

January 2023

February 2023

I started the month by reading more Barbara Michaels--Sons of the Wolf, because I was reminded I enjoy Victorian gothic by February's reading and Patriot's Dream, because I remembered that it had a dream-based supernatural element, as does the book I wrote in January, and I wanted to see how Michaels handled it.

In other fiction news, I read The Atomic Weight of Love, which covers the adult lifespan of the main character who sets out to become an ornithologist but ends up married to a physicist who is hired to work on the secret nuclear installation at Los Alamos, NM. It's about the main character trying to hold onto her dreams and identity while being absorbed into someone else's world. It's sad but happy-sad, in that there's a certain amount of triumph and redemption despite it all. And I thought it was beautifully written. I also read Bewilderment by Richard Powers, which is also beautifully written but just plain sad-sad, about a single dad trying to raise an exceptional child in an ecologically damaged world.

In the nonfiction department, I read The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan, which is fun and funny (despite being about the author and her father both going through cancer treatments at the same time), although I gotta say, the idea of being part of such a loud, boisterous, in-everyone's-business family gives me hives. I also read MORE by Majka Burhardt, a memoir covering the time period from the author's early pregnancy through toddlerhood mothering twins while she was also trying to run an international conservation organization and rock- and ice-climb professionally (and also deal with the pandemic). It's ultimately about the struggle to find a way that mothers can live lives in which they do meaningful work, care for their children, and have healthy and equitable relationships with their partners. Stay tuned for my interview with Burhardt to appear in Literary Mama later this year.

And finally, for creative inspiration, I've been doing a 100 Days of Poetry project, and a friend loaned me Every Day is a Poem, by Jaqueline Suskin, which has a lovely range of exercises for all kinds of poetic expression. I also re-read Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit, which is in part what inspired me to focus on poetry now; one of Tharp's recommendations is to, after you finish a big project, put your efforts toward something totally different (thus poetry following a novel).

Friday, February 17, 2023

Book Stack ~ January 2023

A monthly post about what I've been reading.

While Christmas shopping with my kids, I pointed to Barbara Kingsolver's latest book, Demon Copperhead, and told them they could get me that for Christmas. M took the hint, and in January I read the retelling David Copperfield, situated in rural Appalachia the midst of the opioid crisis. Through the engagingly delightful voice of young Demon--which never resorts to dialect or other cheap tricks to convey regionality--the reader is taken on a journey through systemic poverty, a failed social services system, and drug addiction. Born in a trailer in western Virginia, raised by an unstable mother, subjected to a cruel stepfather, shunted through a series of foster homes, and put to work too young in dangerous jobs, Demon has the deck stacked against him from the beginning. As with Dickens's character, despite the many ways life goes wrong for Demon, his fortunes often rise, and though he's forced to confront multiple villains, he is also blessed with good people in his life who help to steer him in the right direction. As a narrator, Demon is both innocent and wise in the telling of his tale, and through his voice and his life history, Kingsolver manages to convey the ravages that centuries of institutionalized poverty and exploitation and abuse by the tobacco, coal, and drug industries have wreaked on the region, while neither romanticizing the people nor condescending to them. She also celebrates the natural beauty of the landscape and the values of hard work, strong family ties, and attachment to the land that characterize the area. This book gripped me more than anything I've read in a long time--I stayed up way too late several nights in a row because I couldn't stop reading--and before I was even done I went out and got a copy of David Copperfield. It was a delight to read the original and see the ways Kingsolver turned a Victorian lawyer into a Virginian football coach, an honest and determined old fisherman into a feisty young nurse, and, of course, the ghastly Uriah Heep into the equally ghastly U-Haul Pyles. The combined 1,400 pages of the two books flew by in a matter of weeks, despite Dickens's version sagging a bit between about page 200 and 500 (due to young Copperfield going through a relatively good spell at that stage in the book).

On the lighters side, I also read three delightfully gothic Barbara Michaels novels: The Walker in the Shadows; House of Many Shadows; Be Buried in the Rain; and Wait for What Will Come. When I realized in December that I didn't own a copy of Ammie Come Home, I went through my collection to see what else was missing and ordered them from a used book shop. Michaels is the pen name that Barbara Mertz aka Elizabeth Peters used for her books of suspense. These often, though not always, have a supernatural element and are generally more serious in tone than her Peters books, though not without humor, and they frequently have gothic elements--the big creepy house, the young ingenuous heroine who can't leave for some reason, mysterious goings-on, often a housekeeper who is either alarmingly grim in demeanor or unbelievably cheery. Occasionally they take place in the classic Victorian gothic setting. There's always at least one handsome love interest (and in one case four), who is sometimes a friend and sometimes a foe, and sometimes the heroine doesn't know which until too late. These four are all contemporary (as in they take place in the '70s and '80s, when they were written), and they're evenly split between those with supernatural causes of the mysterious happenings and those with human villains. House of Many Shadows is fun for being one of the few of Michaels's books with an older protagonist (although there is, as always, still a pair of "confounded young lovers," as Radcliffe Emerson--chief hero of the Amelia Peabody series by E. Peters--would say). So it's never too late to find yourself in a haunted house.

The novel I drafted in January was a takeoff on the Barbara Michaels contemporary gothic--an homage if you will--so it was fun to read these at the same time as writing my own. I even hid some Easter eggs in the text, including Michaels's books on the shelves of the creepy house.

Friday, January 20, 2023

Book Stack ~ December 2022

A monthly post about what I've been reading, with aspirations but no real hope of reading down a very tall stack of books. Previous posts from this year:

Every year when I get to my final Book Stack post of the year, I contemplate whether I should continue with these posts into the new year or not. After all, the blog is dead as a format, right? But this is also the only way I track what I read (I've tried a reading journal in the past, and I'm just not that into it, and I don't really like Goodreads, not least because it's part of the Evil Empire, and I don't care to note the date on which I start a book or how long it took to read), but I've kept up with a monthly reads blog post for X years now, and I know from flipping back through the 2022 posts that I read 86 books last year. Which is neither here nor there, but it's a fun fact. So will I keep going in 2023? We'll see. In the meantime, here are December's reads, starting from the bottom of the stack.

Nonfiction

There's an unwritten rule in Maine that if you own a camp (which means a vacation house on a lake, no matter how humble or luxurious), you must have, somewhere on the shelves of that camp (and if it's rustic, the shelves will be horizontal 2x4s of the open wall bays) a copy of We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich. In the book, Rich chronicled her experience of moving to an extremely remote spot of western Maine in the 1930s, where the only access to the Outside is by lake (boat in summer, over the ice in winter, and not at all during freeze-up and break-up). It's a funny and lighthearted book that makes even the most grueling physical labor involved in surviving, let alone keeping house and raising a family, under such circumstances sound like a lark. After reading Rich's biography in November, I ordered used copies of some of her other books (when the three arrived, each with a turquoise hard cover, devoid of dust jacket, E asked me if I'd bought "one of those sets" of books--you know, the old ones with matching covers that you can, apparently, order as decorative elements irrespective of their contents). One of these, Innocence Under the Elms, which I read in December, recount's Rich's childhood, growing up in Bridgeport, MA, where her parents ran the local newspaper. Nothing much of consequence happens in the book, but Rich's writing is so wonderful in its subtle humor and deep perception and her childhood so unusual--both compared to anything anyone alive has experienced (she was born in 1903) and compared to her contemporaries because of her family's occupation, social status, and politics--that it's a delightful, entertaining read.

Fiction

I pulled Stitches in Time by Barbara Michaels (which I just read three years ago and again three years before that) off the shelf in early December with the intention of giving it to a friend who I knew would love a book about a haunted quilt (because I mean, come on, who wouldn't?). But then I decided to read the first chapter, as practice for a book coaching lesson on first chapters. And then I kept reading. Since it takes place around the holidays (it may be the only holiday-themed Barbara Michaels book, but I'm not sure and I'm determined to find out), it was a perfect read for December. Because as Dickens taught us, Christmas time is prime ghost time.

As I was reading Stitches, I remembered that Michaels had another vintage-clothing themed book, Shattered Silk, which I couldn't find on my shelves, so I ordered a copy of that. It takes place in the midst of a hot Washington summer, so wasn't as seasonal, and the source of trouble was human-caused, so no ghosts. But it turns out that some of the tangental characters in Stitches are the central characters in Silk, so it was fun to go back and read about where they'd come from (like an origin story prequel), although it wasn't as fun without the ghosts.

After reading those two books, I had to go back and reread (after ordering a copy--I can't believe I didn't already own this one) Ammie, Come Home, one of Michaels's first books. Ammie, like Stitches, is a delightfully creepy ghost story, although it's the house that's haunted and not a quilt. Two of the central characters of that story appear very tangentially in Silk and come back with a bigger role in Stitches. The three books are considered the Georgetown Trilogy, although they were probably not planned that way, having been published in 1968 (Ammie), 1986 (Silk), and 1996 (Stitches).

In December I also read "Santaland Diaries" by David Sedaris, which I always make time to do while sipping eggnog beside the Christmas tree.

Friday, December 16, 2022

Book Stack ~ November 2022

A monthly post about what I've been reading, with aspirations but no real hope of reading down a very tall stack of books. Previous posts from this year:

Looks like November was a light month for reading. Part of the that was Thanksgiving and all of the preparations thereunto. Part of it was that I labored over books that I am not enjoying and did not finish (yet). I have a hard time admitting to defeat on a book and affirmatively quitting it (although I'm pretty good at letting it gather dust on my nightstand with a bookmark at the halfway point). Both are books I *really* wanted to love but do not, not even a little bit. And that bums me out. I also am slowly making my way through another longish book that is a little heavy going (in terms of subject matter), so I need to spread it out among a lot of light reading, which is what I've got here.

Fiction

Starting from the bottom of the pile, I read The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits, edited by Mike Ashley, which I only picked up because Elizabeth Peters wrote the introduction and one of the stories. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. Most of the stories take place in Ancient Egypt, and I'd liken them to fantasy in terms of building a world so dissimilar to our own. I didn't think I'd be able to suspend my disbelief in Sherlock-Holmes-types carrying out crime investigations in the time of the pharaohs, but I got swept right in from the beginning through 500-odd pages.

My other reads for the month were also mysteries: Deborah Crombie's A Bitter Feast, which takes place at an English country house (one of the best settings for murder and mayhem), in contemporary times with a whole cast of Scotland Yard detectives who are supposed to be on holiday but instead find themselves swept up in the murder of a famous but down-on-his-luck chef. I found it very entertaining. The other was Murder is in the Air by Frances Brody, starring her private investigator from the between-the-wars years, Kate Shackleton. This one takes place in and around a brewery. I've ready one other Brody mystery, and I've enjoyed them both.

Nonfiction

For a project I'm working on I read Alice Arlen's biography of Louise Dickinson Rich, She Took to the Woods. [Full disclosure: I have not *quite* finished reading the excerpts of Rich's writing that appear at the back of the book, b/c I got so interested I purchased several of the (out-of-print) books themselves.] I'll write more about Rich and her writing in the future, but I'll say that this peek behind the scenes is fascinating. I was especially interested in how, in her diary she was forthright about how she and her family were nearly *starving* for much of the time in their early years at Forest Lodge, but her writing in We Took to the Woods turns that desperation into funny anecdotes about how to cook creatively to stretch meager supplies (blamed on the difficulties of getting food into their remote cabin in the spring and fall when the lake was neither frozen nor navigable by boat).