While I was reading Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve earlier this month, the chapter on clichés in modern literature really resonated with me. It struck me that they might be one of the biggest problems I have with contemporary fiction. Being so tuned into clichés in writing by that book, though, nearly ruined my listening experience with the fourth in Jan Karon's Mitford series, Out to Canaan. I don't know that it is worse than any of the other books in the series, but it seemed like nearly every paragraph or conversation between characters contained at least one cliché. It was driving me nuts. I felt bad that I was reading something so riddled with formula and platitudes. Until. One morning while listening I realized that clichés are one of the things I like about the Mitford books. I grew up in a very small town (pop. 419) like Mitford, and I'm here to tell you, folks in small town talk in clichés. Not necessarily because they're uneducated, but often because that's part of the shared culture of a small place. I've noticed that in a small town, people often see big ideas different and distill them to their essences. They ignore nuance and skip directly to a logical conclusion. That's what happened in Mitford, and that's what happened in my hometown. I was able to enjoy Out to Canaan quite a bit after I stopped listening for the clichés and looking for the wisdom behind them. In this novel, Father Tim announces his retirement 18 months hence, his wife Cynthia is working on another Violet the cat book for children, and the town is looking at a lot of possible change including a nasty mayoral election. I liked this one, and I recommend the series to anyone looking for fiction without sex, drugs, infidelity, and drama, and with a heavy dose of faith and old-fashioned values. My rating: 4 stars.
I come from a long line of flower-obsessed women--on both sides of the family. My mother's mother grew African violets with blooms the size of silver dollars. She could coax most anything to grow in her red, sandy soil. My great-grandmother was known for her gladiolas (her name as Gladys, Glady for short, so that makes sense). Her daughter, my grandmother, would rather spend her time mucking in her garden than anywhere else on earth. My mother has the bug, too. From these women, I inherited a great deal of plant knowledge which includes identifying a plant I've never seen before. It's a spooky blessing. I guess some things are just born into you and locked away until you're walking through a plant nursery. But while I enjoy flowers, I don't really enjoy gardening. Keeping flowerbeds weeded is the bane of my existence. I love looking at flowers and learning about gardening, but I don't want the work that comes with them. Enter Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden. This fabulous book breaks down how to grown dozens of common varieties of flowers (e.g. irises, chrysanthemums, dahlias, etc. etc.). The author takes you through her huge cutting gardens season by season, telling you what to plant when, how to get more blooms, when to cut flowers for arranging, and lots more. Each season chapter is broken down into chapters on the flowers flourishing during that season, and there are loads of photos of different varieties of each flower. The information is comprehensive but not overwhelming. The tone is friendly and helpful. And the photos are to die for. I loved this book. And I'm going to order a copy for my mother, who I know will love it too. My rating: 5 stars.
I love memoirs. And I especially love travel memoirs. I'll read about anyone's trip anywhere. Armchair traveling is one of my favorite bonuses of reading. So in early April, when I kept seeing At Home in the World pop up on other author's blogs and in their Instagram photos, I decided to pick up a copy. I'm so glad I did. This a wonderful book. The author and her husband, Americas who met in Kosovo, decide to take their three young children (ages 9, 7, and 4, I believe) on a nearly yearlong journey around the world. They stop in China, Australia, several African countries, Turkey, Italy, Germany, France, England, just to name a few destinations. They carry everything they need in a backpack each, stay in real homes, visit with expat friends, and see some of the great wonders of the world. The book isn't exactly what I've come to expect from travel memoirs. They often focus heavily on where they went and what they saw, but this book focuses more on how the places felt. Throughout the book, the author talks about the equal longing in her for both adventure and for home. When she's traveling, she wants to be home; when she's home, she imagines herself halfway around the world. It was an interesting frame for the story of their year abroad. I noticed time and again that wherever they were, they tried to make it a home. Not to say they resisted the culture they found themselves in, they did, after all, choose to be there. But the family did look for the stability of home in places like Beijing and Nairobi. This made the book much more real than other travel books I've read. At first I was disillusioned because it focused so much less on the cities and sites than I'm used to from these books, but I finally got over this preconceived notion and was able to enjoy floating along with them. I recommend this book highly. My rating: 4 stars.
Encyclopedia Of an Ordinary Life is one of my favorite books on the planet. There, how's that for an opening line of a nonbiased review? I read it for the first time in 2005, shortly after it came out, and returning to it now was so familiar and, just, wonderful. I love the way Amy Krouse Rosenthal's mind works. I love that her books have such unconventional narrative styles. I love how she collects coincidences and everyday experiences and displays the baubles of her mind in such a fresh, openhanded way. Her books have a very generous spirit, fun, self-aware, and superficial yet deep. They're just so wonderful. And this is the one that started it all for me. It's Amy's memoir written as encyclopedia entries. It's a fun book to dip into and out of. It's so witty, and I defy you to read it and be unable to do two things: (1) share at least one quote or anecdote from it, and (2) want to write your own encyclopedia memoir. My all-time favorite moment: when she describes how her brother, who grew up with three sisters, was a grownup before he realized he didn't need to wrap the bath towel around his chest. If you haven't read this book, pick up a copy. You're in for a treat. My rating: 5 stars.
I also finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. Very much like her previous little book on feminism, We Should All Be Feminists, this was a long essay explaining how to raise a feminist daughter in Africa. I'm a little confused by the popularity of these books. There's nothing here I didn't encounter in my high school sociology class in the early 1990s. (And that was in a tiny Wisconsin town.) Her suggestions are so pat and simple, things like reject the notion that pink is for girls and blue is for boys, be a role model of what you want her to learn, etc. Some suggestions are just plain questionable: teach her that sex is good and never immoral. Never does spirituality enter the picture; how does a woman live a whole life without taking care of her spiritual needs? Perhaps this book and its predecessor are intended for the African audience, as the examples of gross patriarchal overreach are all African, and apparently Africa has not progressed past 19th century American culture when it comes to issues of gender and equality between them. I just find these books much to simple and uninteresting for the American woman. My rating: 2.5 stars.
I was excited to read Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant's new book, Option B. It's the memoir of Sandberg's first couple of years after her husband passed on unexpectedly. More than memoir, though, it's about how to deal with grief (your own or others') and how to foster resiliency. It's a short, quick read, told in straightforward, honest prose. I was interested in the book even though I'm not dealing with grief, and my recent experiences with grief have been much different from Sandberg's. I did gain some tips on what to say and what not to say to someone in the throes of grief, what's helpful and what's not. I didn't feel that the adversity, resilience, and joy parts of the book were nearly as interesting or helpful as Sandberg's narration of her experience, but then I'm a memoir junkie. In all, I liked the book, and I'd recommend it to someone who is dealing with grief, but it may not appeal a lot to folks who aren't presently dealing with great loss. I didn't feel that the resiliency information was all that transferrable to non-grief situations. My rating: 3 stars.
Since I abandoned My Italian Bulldozer on my lunch break at work, I had to find another book from my TBR that my library owned to read on afternoon break (oh the perks of working at a library!), so I chose Michael Perry's Roughneck Grace, and I loved it. It's a collection of short essays originally written for a newspaper, and they're fabulous. Hilarious as always. My favorites were about ground moles and how folks of a certain age can use selfie sticks to put enough distance between their eyes and smartphones to actually read their darn text messages. Brilliant! Perry does an amazing job of balancing self-deprecating humor, oddball antics, and truly touching moments of fatherhood. I highly recommend all of his nonfiction work (my favorite being Coop), and this one is no exception. My rating: 4 stars. 
I spent a lot of time on the couch reading this weekend. I needed that. In addition to finishing Roughneck Grace, I finished Poems That Make Grown Women Cry. I felt like I'd spent too much time with it, and I'm glad to have it done. I didn't necessarily dislike it, but it really didn't have the same punch that Poems That Make Grown Men Cry did. Oddly enough, I found the Men poems were much more emotional than the Women poems. The Women tended to cry over social injustice, whereas the Men tended to cry over children growing up, parents dying, and things of an interpersonal nature. I have a short list of poems that have ever made me cry (maybe I'll share that someday), but my list tends to match up well with the Men's list of poems. I'm not big on books about social justice as I don't enjoy the preachy-ness of them, and this book often bored me. It felt lackluster and somewhat robotic. Although a highlight was Sharon Olds' introduction of Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," a poem that is on my short list of poems that actually have made me cry. My rating: 3 stars.
I'm glad to finally be done with The Chilbury Ladies' Choir. I was just sure I'd love this book--the reviews have been very good--but I have to tell you, I was disappointed. I had no problems with the plot or characters. Briefly: this book takes place on the English home front during World War II. Most of the men of Chilbury have gone off to war, leaving the women to carry on. They change their church choir into an all-lady choir. But it really isn't about choirs or the power of music to heal or uplift. That is touched on superficially, but not in depth. This is really the soap opera of the home front. There are seductions and scoundrels and folks falling in love and love triangles and ambitions and abuse and death and all the rest. But here is my problem with the book: I didn't like the way it was told. Instead of a straightforward narration in either first or third person, it was told through journal entries and letters. This in and of itself doesn't bother me, but when you choose this narration method, you are obligated to give each character her own voice. This is where the writing falls miserably short. All of the journals and letters sound exactly the same, whether written by 13-year-old Kitty or middle-aged Mrs. Tilling. They use the same language and observe things in the same way. Additionally, the characters describe their actions as an omniscient narrator would, not as a person would describe their own actions. People reporting their actions are prejudiced in favor of their actions; they are not objective about them. It was pitifully distracting to me. I often wondered if it had been written as a conventional novel and then a hasty revision changed the book to a series of journal entries and letters without paying much attention to the details. Plus, although things ended well or rightly for all, there was one plot point that was not resolved that irritates me. Did the author forget? Long story short, I think I would have loved this book (or at least rated it higher) had it been better written. For a good soap opera-y book about the English home front during war, try Julian Fellowes' Belgravia. And for a really good book about post-WWII England written in letters, try The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. It does a superb job of giving diverse characters their own voice. My rating: 2.5 stars.
 |
| Photos taken outside Art Institute (museum) in Chicago. One of my favorite places. |
