What I read in February

Well, another month and no weekly posts. I have every intention of getting back to that format, but it just didn't happen this month. I am, however, enjoying reading more than I have for the last few months, so maybe the unintended hiatus has worked for me. I feel like I'm reading more books that deeply satisfy me. It's wonderful.

I finished 13 books in February, and I'll give full reviews to the four that I enjoyed most. I'll review the others with shorter reviews. If I don't do this, I just won't catch up.

I was interested in reading American Dirt when I read about it on Christmas break back in December--long before all the controversy erupted. I have to say I don't really understand the controversy other than that it's identity politics at work, and that almost never makes sense. To weigh in, I don't believe the publishing industry is deliberately trying to squash brown voices by not publishing their books. The publishing industry exists at least as much to make money as it does to produce quality literature (and the cynic in me would say "more so"). It's a business, and if folks are clambering for something, they'll publish it. I also don't think Oprah, the author, nor anyone who reads the book is a racist. For goodness sake, let's spread love and make the positive argument for our fellow human beings. I believe what the author writes in the back of her book, that she spent five years researching and writing this book, and although she did not make the journey to America via the Beast, she is compassionate toward those who do. Also, there is the obvious statement that must be made: if we only published and read books by people who experienced everything in them firsthand, we'd have no Steinbeck, Hemingway, or even Austen. That's a ridiculous criteria. All of that said, I liked the book. It was a gripping depiction of a mother and her young son's journey to America, outrunning a drug lord who has murdered 16 members of their family and wants to murder them too. There was not much brutality, if that was a concern of yours. The author did a pretty good job of hiding her pro-illegal immigration bias, at least giving passing acknowledgement to the fact that what they were about to do was illegal. I found the characters very believable. I finished the book with a more compassionate view of those who have to make this difficult journey and the difficult choice to live a life of subterfuge in a country not their own. It did not change my firmly held beliefs about illegal immigration, however. This one is well worth your time. It was written in a tone I can only call "immediate" which nailed the frantic mood of the mother and son as they make their way to "El Norte." My rating: 4 stars.

While making my way through 1,000 Books to Read before You Die (I'm up to the Ms now), I came upon an entry for Shirley Jackson's Life among the Savages, which will likely be one of my favorites of the year. Jackson is best known for her dark stories, but this is a fictionalized memoir of her life with her husband and four young children (two are born in the course of the book) in a full, rambling house in the 1940s or so. It's very, very funny and full of charm. The children really come to life on the page, and Jackson has a way of writing about seemingly insignificant domesticities in a smart and engaging way. I enjoyed this book so much. I have a feeling 1,000 Books to Read... is just full of these gems--books you've never heard of that are just wonderful. I highly recommend this one. Also, when I went back to re-read the entry for the book in 1,000 Books to Read..., I discovered that Jackson penned a sequel. I ask you, is there anything more satisfying than finding out a book you love has a sequel? My rating: 5 stars.

Messenger of Truth is the fourth in Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs mystery series. In the series, which begins in post-Great War Britain, Maisie Dobbs runs a private investigation agency and solves murder cases. But Maisie is no ordinary British detective. She is trained in psychology and uses what she learned to get closer to the truth than the blokes at Scotland Yard can with their traditional methods. These books are smart, and they read more like literature with a mystery thrown in than a plain mystery story. I love how they're written and I love how we get to know the main characters (Maisie; her assistant, Billy; and her father, especially) throughout the series but also really get to know and understand the principal characters in the mystery plot as well. These are slowly plotted, and the attention and time paid to details and setup is thorough. And...this was my favorite in the series yet. I loved this book so much. In it, Maisie is asked to determine whether the artist Nick Bassington-Hope's fall to his death from scaffolding he was using to hang his latest, and secret, exhibit was an accident, or whether he was pushed to his death. Nick's work is a brazen, searing look at the brutality of World War I, and it upsets as well as compels people. Secondary plots include a smuggling ring, the heartrending sickness of Billy's young daughter, as well as frank discussion of the haves and the have nots during Great Britain's Depression, contemporaneous with America's. Also, Maisie is living on her own for the first time, and we see her curled up in her chilly apartment, eating tinned soup and reading novels in the evenings. I found this one so satisfying. It was cozy and exciting and had a depth of feeling for large topics that was very meaningful to me. It also feels as though Maisie is at a personal crossroads of sorts, and I can't wait for the next book in the series. My rating: 5 stars.

Three years ago, I read Bret Baier's Three Days in January: Dwight Eisenhower's Final Mission (my review here), and I was disappointed by it. It didn't grab me, and I found it dry and uninteresting. Because of that, I skipped the second book in the series, Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, though I'm a big fan of President Reagan and this point in history. But something made me try the third in the series, Three Days at the Brink, FDR's Daring Gamble to Win World War II. In this one, we learn about the three days in November 1943 in which allies Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin secretly met for the first time to discuss a strategy for winning World War II. Called the Tehran Conference, it's where Operation Overlord was discussed, including the storming of the beaches of Normandy. This was a fantastic book. I listened to it on audio, narrated by the author, whose voice I've long enjoyed on television. I knew much of the facts of the book by heart from the numerous other history books I've read about FDR and World War II, and there wasn't a lot here that was new to me, but there is something to be said for the comforting feeling of an old story you know well being retold. FDR and World War II stories are as familiar to me as scripture, and it often felt that way listening to the story unfold. My mind could automatically fill in the next part. It was oddly comforting. Not everyone, I know, will have this personal reaction to the book, but I don't think it will catch many as staid or boring. Baier paints good portraits of the three principal players: FDR's charm and charisma, Churchill's gruffness and warmth, and Salin's distrustful, circumspect demeanor. He examines how Roosevelt often sides with Stalin to garner good faith, alienating Churchill in the process; Stalin's landgrab at the end of the war and the Cold War that followed; and Roosevelt's death. It's all here in a very readable and sometimes colorful retelling. I really liked this one, and if you're looking for a good, concise explanation of this time in history, I can't recommend it enough. My rating: 5 stars.

This month I also read:

During CYBILs judging last fall, I discovered Rachel Poliquin's Moles (my review here) which I just loved. That made me want to read all of Poliquin's Superpower Field Guides, which led me to Beavers. This was just as wonderful as Moles, and I learned a lot about the little chainsaws of the forest. Specifically, I learned that beavers' front teeth are orange. How could I have never learned this wonderful fact? I wondered it they were maybe orange-ish until I was making my way through our local antique shop which is home to lots of taxidermy pieces, and I found myself face-to-face with a stuffed beaver's incisors. Their color? A definite orange. My rating: 4 stars.

 

I love memoirs by people who are masters at what they do. Trailblazers, geniuses, experts, prodigies, I love learning about what makes them tick. I've always thought Elton John was a musical master. He wrote and recorded a slew of wonderful songs, and I'd always respected him. After reading (listening, actually) his memoir, Me, however, I have less respect for the man. Like a lot of artists of his era, there was a lot of drug use going on, and we learn every nasty detail of it. We also learn every nasty detail of his homosexual sex life and his drama queen (he'd call himself that; it's not my term) hysteria. He seems a man who took a long time to grow up, if indeed, he has, but the book was very honest, which I respect. It was also well written as far as celebrity memoirs go. But, if you don't want all the details, it might be best to skip it. If you do decide to tackle it, though, do it on audio. The audio performance, and there's no other word for it, was magnificent. It should win an award. My rating: 3 stars.

 

I'm not sure how Beneath the Tamarind Tree came to my attention, but I admit the cover really caught my eye. This is the story of the 276 girls abducted by Boko Haram in Chibok, Nigeria in 2014. I'm sure you remember the story from that time, and the #BringBackOurGirls movement it ignited, but like me perhaps you wondered whatever became of the girls. This is the rest of the story, or what can be told of it. Some of the girls, I believe, never came home. The author, Isha Sesay, is a CNN reporter who followed this story, and when some of the girls came home, she was there to tell the world their story. But by that point no one was interested anymore. I had trouble with this book. First, it was not at all clear to me why the girls were stolen. We heard reports of them being sold into sex slavery, but that doesn't seem to be the case overall. Also, I'm not clear on the fact that any abuse took place. Of course, stealing a young woman away from her home is criminal, it would seem the darker crimes we all assumed happened (rape, torture, death) perhaps didn't. It seemed the worst that happened were they were moved a lot, pressured to become Muslims, and were malnourished. So what was the point of taking them then? My main issue with the book was the judgmental attitude of the author about the world's response. Assertions were made over and over that if these girls were white the world would care and they'd be rescued. It there were rich..., if they were American.... Yes, had they been American, they would have been rescued, because America has the might and priorities to do so. But to assert that it's America's or Britain's or France's responsibility to rescue Nigerian girls when their own government repeatedly lied about the situation and did almost nothing to find the girls, and then castigate those countries because they didn't, is grossly unfair. So, what you have here is another good story made political by the journalist reporting it. It's a pity, because we were all wondering what became of the girls. My rating: 3 stars.

 

I remember enjoying the movie Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House staring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy. The book had an entry in 1,000 Books to Read before You Die so I thought I'd give it a try. (First of all, a shout out to my university library that is slow to weed its collection. Because of that, many of these old gems are readily available--and no wait lists.) This one, however entertaining, didn't do it for me. This is the story of Mr. Blandings and his wife who decide to buy a country home, but end up tearing down the home they buy to build a new one. It details the ups and downs (mostly downs) of every facet of the building process including procuring financing, digging a well, having plans drawn, and choosing paint colors. It's farcical, and yet, very true to life from what we see on HGTV these days. What didn't work for me about this one is the negative tone. I have a good sense of humor, and I like dry humor, but this was just too adverse and discouraging for my taste. Mr. and Mrs. Blandings don't get along well, and they go after each other, and Mr. Blandings picks fights with everyone, though we're meant to think of his as the downtrodden victim. All in all, had Mr. Blandings been a more pitiable character, this would have worked much better. My rating: 3 stars.

 

The Postal Confessions is Max Garland's first book of poetry and one of my favorites to return to. As Max was my college poetry workshop professor, and was the poet laurate of Wisconsin, I'm biased. This book is full of charming, approachable, nostalgic poems with a little humor thrown in. A true treasure. My rating: 4 stars.

 

I did not know when I bought The Guest Book nor when I committed to listening to it months later that I was about to read a story of white privilege. Had I known, I would not had started it per my 2020 reading goal to avoid books about outrage. It's a shame, too, because it is beautifully written and the characters are fleshed. It took a long time to get preachy, but when it did, I felt duped and betrayed. With a subtler hand, it could have been great. A note on the audio: it's pretty terrible, likely the muddiest audiobook I've ever listened to, so you might want to read this in paper. My rating: 3 stars.

 

 

I was looking forward to reading Africa, Amazing Africa ridiculously much. To learn a little bit about each African country sounded right up my alley. Unfortunately, this one didn't work for me for exactly that reason: there wasn't room enough to write more than a little about each country, just one page each, and most of that was artwork. Also, there was something that bothered me that's hard to put into words, so I'll try to illustrate it. When I say Rwanda what do you think of? What about Somalia? What about Sudan? Genocide, pirates, war. But the book talked about things such as how much people in this country like soccer. Fine, I guess, for kids, but it seemed, and I struggle for the word...disingenuous? whitewashed? It made me uncomfortable. I know there would be a general reluctance to discuss genocide in a children's book, but I know plenty that do discuss such topics, and don't we need to? Those do forget the past are doomed to repeat it. I don't know, but I was dissatisfied. My rating: 2 stars. 

 

I just don't know what to say about A Passage to India at all. It's something I'd been meaning to read for a long time, so finally picked up the audio version, which was good. But what did I think of it? I really don't know. What was it about? I don't really know that either. I think it's meant to be a portrait of India in the 1920s, several decades before they gain their independence from England. It's also meant to be, I think, an exploration of the Indian and British cultures and people and where they clash and the misunderstandings that come about. Beyond this, I don't really know what to tell you. I'd like to discuss this one with others who have read it to determine if it really is a meandering story of confused cultures or something deeper. Perhaps, being 100 years old, it's lost a bit of its potency. I really don't know. I think I could come to really like the book, though, if I knew. My rating: 3 stars.  

 

Erick Larson's work is a bit hit or miss with me. I loved The Devil in the White City (my review here), but Dead Wake, which everyone seems to love, left me cold. Thunderstuck has been waiting for me on my bookshelf for a long time, and this month when I was looking for some good nonfiction on audio, I decided to try it. It was quite wonderful, definitely more on a par with The Devil in the White City than Dead Wake, in fact, very similar in tone, writing, and plot. This is the simultaneous stories of Marconi developing his radio telegraph system and the death of opera hopeful Charlotte Bell. It was fast-paced and interesting, but I didn't feel the two stories came together in a perfectly satisfying way. Still, if you liked The Devil..., do give this one a read. My rating: 4 stars.

 

 

What I'm reading this week (10/7/19)

Last week I finished:

I'm always looking for a new mystery series, so I finally decided to try the first book in Millennium series by Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In this book, a journalist who is going to jail for libel is asked to solve the 30-some-year-old murder of a young heiress. What he discovers along the way is disturbing. I have to assume I am not the target audience for this one, although I am unsure who the target audience would be. This series is beloved by many, and perhaps the subsequent books are different, but I found this one too graphic and disturbing. It was also too long by at least a third. There is a secondary plot of international business fraud (or something) that I never did understand and just suffered through at the beginning and end of the book. It's smart writing, good plotting, and the characters, though rather unlovable, are well-drawn. I liked the mystery: how did a young woman disappear into thin air on an island that, at the time of her disappearance, was inaccessible to the outside world? I did not like the graphic sex scenes, the scenes of torture and sadomasochism, and the strong tendency of characters to exact revenge. It was all a little too dark and nasty for my enjoyment. If you like gritty crime stories, this will likely fill the bill for you, though. My rating: 3 stars. 

I cannot tell you the last time I asked a person for advice. I google things all the time to learn how to cook a pork tenderloin in the slow cooker or to double check the definition of sadomasochism (see above), but I'm not one to go in search of human advice. I believe the answers to our problems are within us, because we're all equal parts of divine intelligence--the only kind of intelligence there is. But I know there are a lot of folks who want other people to give them advice. Enter "Dear Sugar." Dear Sugar was (is?) an advice column written by Cheryl Strayed (author of Wild). And a collection of her columns was compiled into Tiny Beautiful Things. She practices what one might call "radical empathy." As someone who recently added a book titled Against Empathy to her TBR, I'm not sure I should have even picked this one up, but this has been on my list of books to read for so long, I decided to knock it off on audio. I know this book is something a lot of people love. I imagine it (and the advice column) has brought comfort and clarity to many. I appreciate that. I just found it disturbing on so many levels. I'll try to articulate that with compassion. Strayed seems to operate under the belief that we are all broken. While I understand this very popular view, I refuse to go through life believing I or anyone I meet is broken. If you look for brokenness, you'll find brokenness, and then you'll never see anything else. Get thee behind me, brokenness. I was also disturbed by the sheer number of people, especially twenty-somethings, but many mature people as well, were willing to give their power of decision-making and the direction of their lives over to a complete stranger. I was also disturbed in general by the kind of things people are sharing with that stranger. The book was full of sexual relationship issues, infidelity, unending grief and the ole gay vs. fundamentalist Christian trope. I found the book exhausting and the situations unbelievable. Sugar (Strayed) answered each question with a lengthy autobiographical essay peppered with terms of endearment (a favorite being "Sweet pea"). She's a master at having a story for every issue she addresses in a letter, and she's lived a lot of life and seen a lot of dis-ease, most of it hard, abusive, and addictive. Perhaps I'm not "broken" enough to appreciate this, but I tend to believe that you will live what you give into. Has my life been touched by infidelity, addiction, grief, alcoholism, poverty? Yes. Is it my choice to let those things own me, or take up residence in my head or heart, or be the undercurrents of my life story? Yes. Lastly, if you are a Christian, you will likely find a fair amount of this advice disturbing. She takes swipes at Christianity and, of course, Republicans (at one point she said she'd rather be sodomized by a lawn flamingo than vote for a Republican), so this book was only meant for half of the country's population. And it was definitely meant for a secular audience. It's not the advice I would have given, but it wasn't necessarily bad, either. (A note on the audio: It was narrated by Strayed, who read the questions and responses in a "poet's voice" [you know, the halting, emphatic voice young poets use when reading their work?], and when she got to her terms of endearment, they sounded faked and staged, like it was her schtick. I would have preferred a different narrator.) My rating: 3.5 stars.

Growing up, family dinner (we called it supper) was a nightly occurrence. We had no idea there were families who didn't eat together each night. What's more, it never really occurred to my brothers and me to have food preferences. There were a couple of things each of us didn't particularly care for, but we still ate it when it was served. Apparently, this is not the norm. Or at least it's not the norm nowadays. Jenny Rosenstrach, author of Dinner: A Love Story, which takes its name from her popular food blog, addresses family dinner head on, especially family dinner with young children. She believes in the nightly family dinner, but shoots for most family members eating mostly the same meal most nights. She also suggests feeding small children (babies and toddlers) their own dinners separate from the parents, which I find a little wacky for my Midwestern sensibilities, but then, we've established that my childhood family dinner experiences may not be average. She offers lots of ways to get children to try foods they say they don't like. One approach to family dining I find kind of genius (once I get past my "wait, who's the adult and why isn't she in charge?" headshaking), is the deconstructed meal, whereby your pasta-hating child can still have certain elements of the family meal while being allowed to ignore a"no-go" food like pasta or eggs or chicken. That way, at least the adult-who-is-in-charge can at least avoid having to make a different meal for each child. This is a re-read for me, and I really enjoy the book as a whole. There are a lot of straight-forward recipes that I have yet to try but really should. And the book, half memoir and half cookbook is beautifully written. I stopped following Rosenstrach's blog a number of years ago out of a frustration with her politics (what ever happened to no politics at the family table?) and her location blindness. She seems to have no awareness that there are folks out here who aren't living her same East Coast life. Still, the recipes are good. My rating: 4 stars.

I've found a new favorite book of poetry for the year. Marie Howe's The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, published in 2009, is one of my favorites of 2019. I've enjoyed her work for a long time (some books more than others), and this is a book very much like her What the Living Do, domestic and everyday, which is the kind of poetry I enjoy most. If you're looking for a short book of contemporary and approachable poetry that will surprise you more with its subtlety than its experimentation, give this one a try. My rating: 4 stars.  

This week I'll finish:

 

I've been taking my time with this one. I kind of don't want it to end.

My evening reads:

 

I have a lot of children's literature to read, so I'd better finish one or both of the poetry books this week.

My next audiobook:

 

I could go for a little Anne Tyler after a couple of heavy audios.

What I'm reading this week (9/16/19)

This week I finished:

Let's just get right to it: The Sun Does Shine is one of the books this year that has affected me most. It had been on my radar since it came out (it was an Oprah pick), but I never really thought it would have such an impact on me. You can never know, and that is why it's so important to me to try all kinds of books. This is the memoir of a Anthony "Ray" Hinton who was convicted of killing two people in the 1980s, who spent 30 years (THIRTY YEARS) on Alabama's Death Row...and who was completely innocent. He had faith during all that time that his appeals would work, that someone would re-examine the facts of the case and fight for him. His trial had been a sham; he was seemingly convicted in the minds of the folks involved before it started. No character witnesses were called to testify on Hinton's behalf. No one asked how he could be checked into a secure work facility the nights of the crimes. Disturbingly, the ballistics expert who testified that the bullets found at the two crimes matched the gun found at Hinton's mother's home, was legally blind. Hinton says he was caught in a justice system that cares more about you if you're white and guilty than if you're black and innocent. But he never gave up. Though his faith in God wavered in his first few years in prison, he eventually picked his Bible back up, started a book group in prison, and did a kind of cell to cell mentoring to the other inmates on Death Row. Over his 30 years there, more than 50 men and women were ushered past his cell to their executions. Hinton's case turned around when Bryan Stevenson (yes, that Bryan Stevenson) took over his defense. Finally, in April of 2015, his conviction was overturned and he was released from prison. It's an amazing story of racism, justice, faith, forgiveness, and the strongest mother/son bond you've ever read about (my favorite quote from the book is Ray's mother's "God can do everything but fail."). If you read it, you'll never forget it. I plan to read Stevenson's book this fall. I want to know more. My rating: 5 stars.

Ray Hinton's story took place in Birmingham, Alabama, and that's where Condoleezza Rice's story starts, too. Known as the last bastion of full-out racism, Birmingham during Rice's younger years was still segregated under Jim Crow law. Her parents told her that even though she was not allowed to eat a hamburger at the Woolworth's lunch counter, it didn't mean she couldn't be the president some day. And, of course, she almost was. Condoleezza Rice was a concert pianist, competitive figure skater, and provost of Stanford University; she served on the National Security Council as the Soviet and Eastern Europe affairs advisor in the President George H. W. Bush administration where she had a hand in the dissolution of the Soviet Union and reunification of Germany; and she served as President George W. Bush's National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. If you ask me the three women I admire most, Rice is on the list. Her memoir, Extraordinary, Ordinary People, is not only the story of her life, but also a loving tribute to her parents, both educators (or "education evangelists" as her father put it) in predominantly southern black schools before moving west to Denver. Her father was a preacher and a teacher. Her mother taught in black high schools and emphasized music and performance. She talks honestly about growing up in a segregated south, about racism, which she calls "America's birth defect," and about being a black woman in the highest echelons of academia and government. It's a remarkably wise account, told with such dignity and purpose. This was my second time reading it, and it has stood the test of time. It's wonderful. My rating: 5 stars.

I live to be surprised by a book. It's truly one of my favorite things. Year of Yes surprised me. It started out as something I wasn't sure I'd finish, and it ended up being something I wanted to read again as soon as I finished. I'm late to this book, after all, it came out nearly four years ago; I don't know Shonda Rhimes from Adam, and I've never watched a single episode of the television shows she wrote, Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and Private Practice. But I have a thing for "year of XYZ" books and books about women changing their lives for the better. I was expecting something fluffy and funny--and that's how it started out, it was annoyingly fluffy and funny--but it got deep quickly, and I ended up loving it. Rhimes and I don't agree on everything, but we do agree that your life is yours to change, and we don't have to be victim to saying "no" to opportunity. While I expected the things she says "yes" to to be tangible things like Hollywood engagements and risky behaviors with a little personal challenge thrown in (and there was a bit of that), what she ended up saying "yes" to were things like losing weight, staying single, and saying "no." In the early part of the book, she was light and bubbly and wise-cracking lame jokes that were too obvious to be funny. I thought to myself, this woman does not know who she is, and I'm not sure I can learn much from someone like that. As she got deeper into her project, though, she exhibited a self-awareness that was rather stunning. This ended up being one of the better "you go girl" books I've read, and I want to own a copy of it. Give it a try if you haven't; you might be surprised. I listened to the audio, read by the author, which was very good. My rating: 4 stars.

I work and live in an environment so liberal that I often feel stifled and silenced. I have to make a conscious effort to keep my beliefs to myself almost all of the time. It's a terrible feeling, so occasionally I'll read a book by an unabashed conservative just to feel a part of my tribe for a sustained period of time. With Judge Jeanine Pirro's new book just released, I decided to try her old book (from July 2018), Liars, Leakers, and Liberals on audio. I expected a way-slanted right, no holds barred, hard-hitting account of all that is wrong with liberals, the media, and the White House leakers who want to take down President Trump. And that's exactly what I got. There is zero nuance in this book. And frankly, I didn't like it at all. It was too full of conservative bias, too condemnatory, and just made me feel bad for being a part of it all. Here's a good rule of thumb in politics: if there is not one thing the other side is doing right, if you cannot say one thing about the other side or a member of the other side, you aren't being honest. If I don't like it when the left does it, why should I tolerate it from the right? I did not know that the judge is a good friend of the president's, going back decades. Several chapters near the end of the book dealt with her glowing opinions of the president's intentions and his wonderful family. While these read rather like a long campaign ad for President Trump, it was interesting to hear it from someone who's had a front-row seat to his life for years and years. If you're looking for a u-rah-rah for the right, you might like it. If you enjoy Judge Jeanine's take-no-prisoners approach to politics, you will like it. But if you're looking for a balance of thoughts and ideas, you won't find it here. I found this too partisan to enjoy. My rating: 3 stars.  

 

You all know I'll read anything by or about a Kennedy, so some time ago when I found out that the nannie to Caroline and John Kennedy Jr., Maud Shaw, had written a memoir in 1966 that Mrs. Kennedy read and approved, I had to get my hands on a copy. Little did I know until recently (how did I miss it?), our university library had a copy! How much do you want to bet I'm the first to have checked it out in decades? This is the gentle account of Miss Shaw's seven (or eight?) years with the Kennedy children, having been hired shortly after Caroline was born, and leaving a couple of years after the president's assassination. She has great esteem for the President and Mrs. Kennedy (you'll get no dirt, remember that Jackie read the manuscript before it was printed), and she talks with great fondness of shy, bookish, and bright Caroline, and naughty little John Jr. It's an honest account, though you can often tell there are things she isn't saying. I believe Christopher Andersen used this book as a primary source for his book Sweet Caroline, which I reviewed recently. In other accounts, I'd read that Miss Shaw was asked to leave the family because Mrs. Kennedy was uncomfortable with how close the children were getting to certain staff members and secret service agents. Miss Shaw indicates that she thought it was time to leave and return to England to care for her ailing siblings. I'm not sure I buy it, but who knows. It was a sweet book, full of practical hints for raising (someone else's) children (I liked her "sense of fair play" rule), charming stories of the Kennedy kids, her life at the White House and at Jackie's Fifth Ave. home, and her life prior to taking the Kennedy job. A must-read for the Kennedy-phile. My rating: 4 stars.

This week I'll finish:

I'm liking this one more than I expected.

My evening reads:

 

I'll finish the Anna Quindlen book this week, and hopefully the poetry book. I'm enjoying them all, but I don't feel like I'm making great progress, and the month is half gone.

This week I abandoned:

I'm deciding I just don't like travelogue books. Something about meeting tons of people who matter only in the moment makes my reading brain itchy. I got one CD in, and I just couldn't continue.

My next audiobook:

 

 

 

 

What I'm reading this week (7/29/19)

Things have been crazy this summer, and something had to give last week. Therefore, no update last week. Therefore, a big update this week.

What I've finished in the last two weeks:

I believe I have read all of Ruth Reichl's books, and I have loved some and I have not liked others. So, I was a bit anxious about her latest, Save Me the Plums, not knowing which category it would fall into. I put off reading it for weeks. Turns out, I needn't have feared, I liked it quite a bit. This is the story of Reichl's time as editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine. If you've read her novel, Delicious!, many parts will feel familiar. And if you've read her My Kitchen Year, you'll know what came after Save Me the Plums. Owing, in part, to how busy I was at the time I was reading this, my attention waxed and waned throughout. I had an especially hard time keeping track of who was who, perhaps because I didn't really understand their positions at the magazine. Overall, I enjoyed the book. I did not like the unflattering way she described people--did she think none of them would ever read her book? Also, I don't have a lot of warmth in my heart for the kind of snobby thinking and culture that values Gourmet, so I wasn't particularly heartbroken when it went under (in the book--I never noticed in real life). My rating: 4 stars.

When I saw that my public library system had a copy of Maid on audio, I decided I'd give it a try. I'll try a lot of things on audio I won't in print, owing to the speed with which I can get through an audio. This one was about what I was expecting. It's the memoir of a working-poor single mom. In it she talks about using seven forms or government assistance and still struggling to make ends meet. For me, the book was equal parts heartbreaking and infuriating. I don't like fiction where the characters keep making bad choices, and I really don't like it in nonfiction. I kept wanting to shake her. Let's continue to drill it into our girls that there are three things they can do that will almost guarantee they won't end up in poverty: 1. Get a college degree. 2. Don't have a baby outside of marriage. 3. Marry a man who also works. Let's stop making this theme universal. Let's stop allowing our young women not to take responsibility for their lives. Let's stop the feeling in all of our young people that when their life is hard, someone else should fix it for them or save them from it. At the same time, let's remove some of the government red tape when it comes to getting immediate short-term aid. And let's correct the situation that makes working less lucrative than not working. Lots of blame to go around here, but unfortunately, I felt the book often blamed the wrong things and went for the cheap emotional pull rather than the depth of an honest discussion. My rating: 3 stars. P.S. You wanna know something about this book that irritated me? At one point the author is trying to convince an aid worker that they have to give her food stamps for organic milk because she won't give her daughter skim milk because of all the added sugar that's pumped into it. I was curious about this as I'd never heard anything about skim milk having added sugar. So I checked every brand of milk in two grocery stores, and I didn't find one of them that added anything but vitamins. Fat is removed from skim milk, so the sugars (lactose) will perhaps be concentrated in flavor, but nothing is added to the milk. Fabrications like this should have been eliminated in the editing process, and it made me question every assertion she put forth for the rest of the book.

Traveling with Pomegranates has been on my reading radar since it came out ten years ago. I'm glad I finally got to it, but at the same time, I didn't really miss a lot. Written by mother-daughter writers Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees) and Ann Kidd Taylor (The Shark Club), it's the chronicle of their travels together over a number of years. There were things I liked about the book, and there were things I really didn't like about the book. I enjoyed that the pair had a good mother-daughter relationship. There wasn't a lot of guilt and angst and blame and ugliness that so often come up in mother-daughter relationship books. My favorite part of the book was learning how Sue Monk Kidd conceived of and wrote her bestseller The Secret Life of Bees. That was very interesting to me. What I did not care for in the book was the constant naval gazing on Mom's part; the sacred importance of inanimate objects and the odd mixing of Christian beliefs and Greek mythology; and the uninspired writing. This was a fun one to listen to on audio as it's read by the pair. I dare you not to adore Monk Kidd's southern lilt. I did have trouble, though, determining which year we were in on a number of occasions. I never did figure out the chronology of the book. Reading the book would have made that easier, I think. So, I have very mixed feelings about this one, but I certainly didn't hate it. My rating: 3 stars.

After reading Tiger Woods recently, I decided to read Arnold Palmer's A Life Well Played. I know next to nothing about Palmer, and I don't follow golf, but I like reading about guys of a certain age who do one thing well. I'd have to say that this isn't a traditional memoir. We don't get much by way of personal information here, and the numerous short essays are mostly about golf, playing golf, and selling golf. I was hoping for more of a straight memoir. If you're interested in learning about Palmer, this is a start, but there might be more comprehensive biographies (or perhaps some of his earlier books are more autobiographical). My rating: 3 stars.

I was floundering with reading again this month, when I decided to give myself a pass and just read the next thing that came to me that I really wanted to read. While doing a project in the library, I ran across Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal (I'm still not sure if this is the title or if the title is simply Textbook....). I read this when it came out in 2016, just months before she passed on. I'm still not comfortable living in a literary world that does not include her. She was one of a kind, and her books were so unique and generous and humorous and charming. While I probably prefer her Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, Textbook is a wonderful book as well. I don't always feel that the arrangement of this one makes as much sense as her Encyclopedia, but it's a minor quibble. The book is hard to explain. It's a memoir in textbook form, if by textbook you mean something rather lose and freeform. It's also interactive, and it has a ton of white space. I plan to put it in my library's Popular Reading Collection as I think it will appeal especially to burned-out college kids who need a break from textbooks where the words go "all the way across the page." It was wonderful returning to this book, and I'm glad I allowed myself to do it. It misses nothing on re-read (my original review here). I miss Amy. Her way of seeing and interacting with the world was so refreshing. My rating: 5 stars.

You know I love my No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, and book eight of the series, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive was as good as the others. In this installment, Mma Ramotswe's husband, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, asks to take on a detective case to fight off a case of job stagnancy, Mma Makutsi quits for a day, and Mma Ramotswe handles a case where three hospital patients have died in the same bed on the same day of the week. As much as I enjoy the cases and how they're solved, I really like the quiet, explanatory writing about life and relationships and Botswana national pride. This one I may have enjoyed even a bit more than some of the recent books in the series. My rating: 4 stars.

I do not have the patience for gardening. In other areas, I have the patience of Job, but gardening is just really not my thing. On a list of things to do, pulling weeds is just above poking my eye out, and just barely. But, like most folks, I love a beautiful garden, and I'm so glad we all have different passions. After reading Beryl Gordon's wonderful biography Bunny Mellon, I've wanted to see some of the gardens she created, so I bought the big, beautiful book The Gardens of Bunny Mellon. This one has gorgeous photographs of the various gardens she created for her properties and for others, chief among them the Rose Garden and Jacqueline Kennedy Garden at the White House as well as President Kennedy's gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery and his Presidential Library and Museum. The photos outweigh the text, and the author and publisher have struck just the right ratio. There's enough context and explanation of the different gardens' inspirations and designs to bring understanding to the photographs. I enjoyed this book, though I'll never have so much as a meticulously tended square-foot of garden myself any year of my life. (I do have a few un-meticulously tended square feet currently...) My rating: 3 stars.

Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford was one of my top books of 2017, and when I was looking for more re-reads this year, it was at the top of my list. In college, my poetry was often compared to his (high praise indeed), and I've always felt a kinship with his poems that I've not felt with others. Perhaps a bit of the magic of my first read was diminished this time around, or perhaps I read the book too quickly, but overall, it still made me feel the same weighty lightness his best poems always do. I did feel that the poems got better as they went along (I'm unsure if they are presented in chronological order or not). He's a remarkable poet, and I hope you'll read this book some day. My rating: 4 stars.

 

 

This week I'll finish:

I'm loving this one. Worth the wait.

Last week I abandoned:

I read 50 pages, but I got sick of the husband loving his apple trees more than his family and the wife sabotaging his trees and then the husband retaliating by beating her and the children. Enough was enough.

My current audiobook:

Well-written. Not bad at all.

What I'm reading this week (7/15/19)

Last week I finished:

I love a good atmospheric novel, where the setting is a character, and where extreme weather helps drives the plot. Burial Rites is one of those novels. This is a book I saw all over the place when it came out, but I never even looked into it, because the cover made me think not for me. So if you've had a similar reaction to the cover, try to put that aside. This was a rather impressive historical novel, not to mention the only one I've read set in Iceland. Based on a true story (and soon to become a motion picture), this is the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, accused with two others of murdering two men and then setting fire to the home in 1828 Iceland. A farm family is tasked with lodging Agnes until the date of her execution (by beheading). As grim as the plot is, this is also a story of empathy and the human condition. Bonds are formed, and complicated feelings come to light. I enjoyed this book very much. The writing is nuanced, the plot slow-paced, the characters believable. Give this one a try if you enjoyed Emma Donoghue's The Wonder or Eowyn Ivey's To the Bright Edge of the World. They have similar feelings, if not similar plots. My rating: 4 stars.

There are some books I kind of dread reviewing, and Eleanor and Hick is one of those. I had such a problem with the author's lack of objectivity that I could not trust her book. For many years there has been an assertion that Eleanor Roosevelt had a long-time lesbian relationship with Lorena Hickok ("Hick"). I have yet to see one convincing piece of evidence that confirms that assertion to me one way or the other. Although certain correspondence can certainly be read in such a way to give credence to the theory, there is certainly nothing blatant that hints at anything of a sexual nature. The letters that exist are intimate, they talk about love and missing each other when they're apart, but they do not confirm a lesbian affair. Now, this was close to one hundred years ago, and homosexual relationships were not as open as they have become. Also, Eleanor was a high-profile individual who would have known the importance of keeping such a relationship from the public. Certainly, it was possible, but I cannot say it was definite. Yet, many writers, such as the author of this book, do. I think this kind of reinterpretation of history and re-envisioning of past events is so damaging to the first lady's memory and reputation, and they do a disservice to scholars and young people who don't know how to separate possible from probable. As for the book, if you've read anything about Eleanor and President Roosevelt (I'd suggest Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time or Kathryn Smith's The Gatekeeper), there is nothing new here. The book is not so much about the relationship between the two women as a duo-biography of the women. I did not care for this one. I found it intellectually dishonest, written to capitalize on identity politics because LGBTQ issues are in the forefront of the national consciousness right now. It is not an objective look at the relationship. My rating: 3 stars.

Shortly after my father was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in the late 1990s, I read Sharon Olds' The Father (from 1992), which is a sequence of poems about her father's death. I'm not sure if one thing led to the other or if it was coincidence, but this book will always be very personal to me as I used it to work through what I thought of at the time as my father's mortality. And yet, I have not read the book since, that I can remember. It's an excellent collection. Still, I wonder if I've kind of outgrown my fondness for Olds' poetry. So many of her poems--even poems about her father--are sexual in nature, and it just doesn't always make sense to me. I don't believe you could pay me enough to write about my dead father's penis, for instance. I find a lot of it gross and over the top (all of her recent Odes is like that). But, uncomfortable father-sex imagery aside, this is an excellent collection from beginning to end. The poems stand on their own, but reading them in chronological order adds up to a strong collection. My rating: 4 stars.  

Last week I abandoned:

I have to have likable characters, and there were too many in this one that just weren't. There was too much heaviness here, and I gave up.

This week I'm reading:

I'm anxious for this one--in both definitions of the word.

My evening reads:

I'm making steady progress on each of these. I hope to finish one or two of them this week.

And while processing this one at work, I decided I really wanted to re-read it, so I started it that night.

 

As for this re-read, no progress, so I'm switching to audio.

My current audiobook:

This is not really what I was expecting. I'll put up a review of it next week.