Category: Favorite Books

Tidy Tidbits: Boyhood, McEwan & Chocolate

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This Week’s Movie

Boyhood

I loved Boyhood. We watched it almost in one sitting with only a short break and it was so real.  It’s fiction, a scripted story, but because of its pace, it seems like a documentary.  Mason, the boy, is amazing, but there is something satisfying about watching the parent actors, Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawk, age too over the twelve years.   Being a mother, I was reminded of situations when my son was a teenager.

Boyhood is considered groundbreaking, but there is some precedent in Michael Apted’s Up series.  Apted has filmed the same group of people every 7 years since there were seven years old; the latest installment released several years ago captures them at the age of 56.  The difference is these are individual interviews about what has happened in their lives since the last filming and they are great social and life history. Boyhood creates the daily life of one young man continuously over 12 years.  It is fiction, but feels true.  Up is real people, but it is their reflections on events, not the events themselves.  I’m a fan of both.

One critic I read also examined the role of Mason’s sister, Samantha, and stated that she went from being quite vocal in the early years to getting quieter and less present and that this indicated something about the upbringing of girls.  So I watched Samantha more closely than I might have otherwise, but don’t agree with that critic’s assessment.  Samantha is not the focal point of the film to begin with and I don’t think she got lost.

This Week’s Book

The Children Act by Ian McEwan

I have now read several novels by Ian McEwan and find his writing to be concise and pointed.  Compared to some authors, his works are short to moderate in length.  There are no long descriptions, but rather short, pithy sentences that conjure up in the reader’s mind a person’s appearance or delineate a character’s feelings.  He is particularly good at shame and embarrassment.   Judge Fiona Maye in this his latest novel is walking home from work contemplating her feelings about her husband’s recent departure.

“She went slowly along Theobald’s Road, still holding off the moment of her return, wondering again whether it was not love she had lost so much as a modern form of respectability, whether it was not contempt and ostracism she feared, as in the novels of Flaubert and Tolstoy, but pity.  To be the object of general pity was also a form of social death.  The nineteenth century was closer than most women thought.  To be caught enacting her part in a cliché showed poor taste rather than a moral lapse.  Restless husband in one last throw, brave wife maintaining her dignity, younger woman remote and blameless.  And she had thought her acting days ended on a summer lawn, just before she fell in love.”

Childless Fiona is an intriguing character; I was drawn into her personal and professional life and the family law cases she must adjudicate.  Although I figured out much of the ending, I could sympathize with the approach she took in the Jehovah’s Witness case, the crux of the novel.  She is an appealingly imperfect human.

chocolates Sweet Treats

Valentine’s Day is this week which brings to mind candy hearts and flowers, but especially chocolate.  When I was a child, candy was a special treat and fancy boxes of chocolates something rare.  I have fond and tasty recollections of the special candies my parents received for their birthdays.  My grandparents would send them each a box of Gilbert Chocolates on the appropriate days in February and April.

The box was white and more square than rectangular with a green banner on it.  This was the era of milk chocolate and Gilbert Chocolates were milk chocolate that had tiny bits of nuts in the chocolate surrounding the caramel or cream center.  The favorite collection in our house was called Panama.  With four children eager to share in them, I’m not sure how many pieces my folks actually got for themselves!  I was pleased to discover that the Gilbert company, founded in 1900, is still doing business in Jackson, Michigan, with an expanded line including truffles, fudge, dark chocolate, and of course, the Panama Collection.  The web is wonderful!

Booknote: Youth and Food

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This week I have two books to recommend.  One is serious and to be savored, the other fun and a quick read.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.  This is a magnificent book, and that’s an adjective I seldom, if ever, use to describe a novel.  Two parallel stories, two lives, one of a blind French girl, the other a foster German boy who is taken up by the Nazis, lives which you know must converge eventually.  And they do.  But getting there is long and detailed and sometimes painful.  Like a deck of cards cut and then re-cut and stacked, the chapters are brief, sometimes only a page, and occasionally out of order in time and then layered and re-layered until the inevitable meeting. For natural history buffs, the depiction of the Paris Jardin des Plantes is an added delight.  The book is long–500 pages–and demands to be read slowly.

Delicious! by Ruth Reichl.  A complete change of pace, this is a foodie’s treat and an ugly-duckling-becomes-swan tale all in one.  I thought this might be just a frothy confection, but Reichl knows how to tell a good story.  From the thinly disguised Gourmet magazine (here known as Delicious!), to Sal’s marvelous shop doling out cheese and cheer, to James Beard as a character, there is mystery, friendship and enough good food to send you to the kitchen.  Just plain fun!

Booknote: My Favorite Books of 2014

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Some years ago, I started keeping a list of most of the books I read each year just for myself with some occasional comments.  I received a slew of new books for Christmas and near the end of the year purchased a few so I have an even higher stack than usual awaiting me.  You would think that being retired, I would be doing more reading, but so far, travel and getting settled in have intervened.  One of my 2015 goals is to set aside more time each day to read and to work my way through some of these literary riches.  At this stage of life, I’ve both given myself permission and forgiven myself for not finishing every book I start. There are just too many good books–and more being published– to spend time on one that doesn’t engage me.  I will give most works 50-75 pages before bailing out.

Back to my 2014 list.  Here are my top favorites for the year.  I purposely left off any books I have already blogged about.  In no particular order, they are as follows:

NONFICTION

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande.  Surgeon Gawande is one of my favorite writers and I always read his pieces in the New Yorker where he is a staff writer.  Since we all have or have had parents and aspire to old age ourselves, this book is a must-read.  Using case histories and even his own family as examples, Gawande delineates how we often do not act in an individual’s best interests at the end of life.

Soldier Girls by Helen Thorpe.  Three young women, socio-economically disadvantaged, joined the National Guard partly as a way to increase their income and assuming their tour of duty would all take place stateside.  Instead they were assigned to Afghanistan and one also served in Iraq.  Gripping, painful and informative about the horrors and the boredom of life in a war zone.

House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhouts.  I heard Ms. Lindhouts speak at the Aspen Ideas Festival last summer and then got her book.  It is a chilling story of her kidnapping and imprisonment in Somalia, but even more it speaks to her incredible force of spirit and tenacity to endure and ultimately survive such brutal treatment.

FICTION

Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips.  Based on an actual murder, this novel includes the crime, but focuses more on the press and the surrounding story.  Beautifully written and more accessible than her earlier, also very good novel, Lark and Termite.

Nora Webster by Colm Toibin.  I’m a big fan of Toibin’s work and loved Brooklyn.  This novel traces a young Irish widow’s trajectory of grief and its impact on her children who seem oddly neglected.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.  A tour de force of creativity.  Events occur and then are re-wound to  different endings and then re-wound again in this novel set in the early 20th century.  How might our lives been different or this one life?

The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer.  More straightfoward time travel from 1981 to 1918 and 1941 exploring the role of women in times of crisis–or at least the experience of one woman, Greta. She is an engaging character. A fitting successor to Greer’s The Story of a Marriage which has its own twists.

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Here’s to happy reading in 2015!

 

 

Memoirs & Biography: Jesmyn Ward, Michael Morton and Margaret Fuller

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My reading lately has tended toward nonfiction.  I especially enjoy personal memoirs and biographies of intriguing and somewhat lesser known individuals.  My husband recommended Michael Morton’s memoir and I found it riveting. Morton Called Getting Life: An Innocent Man’s 25-Year Journey from Prison to Peace, it is his account of his conviction for his wife’s murder and his long years in a Texas prison.  He is a white man who finds himself surrounded by blacks in a tough and bleak environment; he had naively assumed (numbed by her sudden and horrific death) that he would never be a suspect.  Due to politics, sloppy  handling of his case and some illegal case work, he found himself imprisoned.  How he deals with the endless tedium, loneliness, and inhumanity of the prison system speaks mightlily to his strong character.

Young black men in many parts of the U.S. face challenges and temptations that are beyond the ken of most of us.  Somehow, I missed Jesmyn Ward’s memoir when it came out last year and only just discovered it in paperback.  Men We Reaped is a haunting, painful and incisive portrait of five young men—poor and black with no real role models and few opportunities or support— all of whom died too young in the space of a few years.  They were cousins, friends, and a brother of Ward’s. The combination of grinding poverty, no full-time parents, the easy availability of drugs, and little sense of self-worth made for hard

JWardlives and early death.  In chapters alternating with accounts of each man, Ward chronicles the turmoil of her childhood, how her perspective on her parents, particularly her mother is revised over time, and her own struggle to value herself as a worthwhile person.  It’s amazing to me that Ward went on to success as a novelist (Salvage the Bones) and also returned to DeLisle to live.  She is now a professor of creative writing.

 

 

 

Retreating to an earlier time, I’m finishing up Megan Marshall’s evocative biography of Margaret Fuller.  Marshall previously wrote a biography of the Peabody sisters (19th century New England education reformers) which I read and enjoyed about 10 years ago.  Getting deep into Fuller’s life, I am re-appreciating what she was able to accomplish as a woman in a very male world.  She had been tutored and schooled  by her father, a harsh taskmaster. So it is not surprising that her primary  intellectual friends included the noted men of the day from Waldo Emerson to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thoreau, as well as others whose names are less know to us today.  She did have friendships with other women and she offered a series of Conversations in which they could enroll.  These get-togethers seem to be the precursors of the women’s clubs–with names like Fortnightly, Roundabout, Current Events–that flourished late in the 19th and early 20th century and provided stimulation and brain food, as it were, for smart women who weren’t allowed professional jobs.  Margaret with her coterie debated philosophy and other topics and she encouraged them to speak out and share their thoughts with one another.

MFullerWhat is also fascinating is how Fuller’s view of the plight of women (property of their husbands) and their potential for a greater place in society and a more equal role in marriage went so far beyond what any other American was proposing. The Dial and later the Herald Tribune, gave her platforms from which to expound; later the publication of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, an expansion of an earlier essay, increased her standing and brought her invitations to speak.  She was a woman of big ideas and both voluble and forceful in conversation and in advocating her views.  I imagine some of her female friends found her a bit too much “in your face.”  Tragically, she died in a shipwreck at the age of only 40.