Other Women's Stories: What I'm reading this week (9/23/19)

Last week I finished:

I love a nice, long, quiet book, but they are really hard to find. Too many books, it seems, try to do too much with their plots, and they seldom are able to bring it all together. That's why I prefer something with a simple plot, something a little slower in pace and richer in character. Saints for All Occasions fit my reading preferences so well. This is the story of two Irish sisters who made their way to America in the late 1950s or so. One sister gets into trouble and the other sister saves her. They become estranged over this choice and one goes on to become a cloistered nun, the other a mother of four. A death in the family years later brings everyone and everything together. I enjoyed this book a great deal. I liked the plot, the characters, the pacing, and the writing. It reminded me very much of Alice McDermott's wonderful books The Ninth Hour, Someone, and Charming Billy, as the same Irish Catholic East Coast mid-century themes are present here. I really, really liked this book. It kept me reading as it unfolded, and I didn't even get frustrated with the "past secrets threaten to rip the family apart" trope that I normally avoid. I recommend this one for anyone looking for a slow, quiet book about the complications of average families. My rating: 5 stars.

I have basically been a grandma since I married 17 years ago. (If "stepgrandmother" is a word, I've never used it, and neither have my grandkids.) You know the old saying, "If I had it to do over again, I've have my grandkids first"? Well, I'm one of the lucky ones who got to have grandkids without really having my "own" kids. While there will always be a sliver of separation between stepparent and stepchild, that sliver can just disappear between stepgrandparent and stepgrandchild. Some of my happiest memories in life have been watching my youngest grandson grow up, and though he's 13 now and much too cool to spend much time with his grandparents, he still lights up and offers a hug when I stop by his house--even when he has friends over. In short, being a grandma (or nana or granny or bubby or whatever you are called) is pretty wonderful. Anna Quindlen, in her new Nanaville, agrees. Not being responsible for the daily care, training, discipline, entertainment, and worry of children leaves you free to have more fun with the child. You can slow down, you can indulge, you can delight more in shared discoveries. Being well rested alone gives nana an advantage! Quindlen also discusses the places it's easy to trip up while being a nana (mostly having to do with unsolicited advice). This was a wonderful book, as all of Quindlen's nonfiction is. I was charmed by it, and by her little grandson, Arthur. It's a short book, but it could have been twice as long as far as I'm concerned. My rating: 4 stars.

I've been trying to read a couple of classics each year, and I've found that audiobooks are an easy way to do it painlessly. I listened to Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey in an effort to read more of the Bronte sisters' work. It's a relatively short book, and it went fast on audio. The plot is simple: Agnes Grey's family has fallen on hard times, so she takes positions as a governess that show the stark differences between the "haves" and the "have nots" of Victorian England. The families she works for are cruel and shallow, and they make her even lonelier for home where she is loved, though without resources. There is a happy ending for Agnes, though, and it's worth the darkness of her working years to get there. It's a simple story, hardly a plot at all, really, but it's an enjoyable listen. My rating: 3.5 stars.

Years ago I read Barbara Ras's book of poems Bite Every Sorrow, and I've finally revisited it. The title of the book comes from a line from the first poem in it, "You Can't Have It All": You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look / of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite / every sorrow until it fled.... Isn't that a wonderful line? I've loved that line for almost 20 years now, and it comes to me periodically when I see a dog who seems to understand his loved one's emotions. Unfortunately, the book as a whole was not a fun reading experience for me. The poems are long in both line and overall, and all long poems go off the rails. It's one of the things I know for sure about poetry after reading and studying (and writing) it for years. Long poems just cannot be sustained. Reading long poems is like trying to recite a dictionary page without taking a breath. Torturous. Impossible. So, there's that. Also, due to the length of the poems, you lose your endurance after one or two. It's not a book you can read much of at a time, and though it's less than 100 pages, it took forever to finish. And when a book takes forever, I get kind of resentful. But the thing is, any one poem taken out of context and read by itself is wonderful. Put too many of them together, though, and it's way too much of a good thing. So, I liked the collection, but I did not enjoy reading it. My rating: 3 stars.

This week I'll be reading: