Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf

Kent Haruf is one my favorite writers. His books are such good stories. The first book of his I read was Plainsong and then its sequel Eventide. I still think those are the best of the lot. I believe I've read all his novels, and I hope he'll write more so I can keep reading them all.

Our Souls at Night is, like all his novels, set in the small town of Holt, Colorado. In this story, a 70-year-old woman, a widow, Addie Moore, asks her neighbor, a widower, Louis Waters, to sleep with her. Sex is not necessary; it's a matter of relieving the loneliness, and nights are the worst.

Both Addie and Louis (persuaded by Addie) decide they don't need to care what people think anymore. Louis openly walks over the Addie's house in the evenings. They enjoy the companionship of sleeping in the same bed and their lives become more engaging by getting to know each other's life stories. Both the characters are people I enjoyed getting to know.

Haruf does not tie everything up in happy endings. I wouldn't call his endings sad or at all depressing, but they feel real. In this book, too, the good thing that Addie and Kent have going is messed up by Addie's grown son. At the same time, the interaction between her son's son and both Addie and Louis is a highlight of the book. So there's good and bad that happens as a result of the connection between Addie and her son.

I highly, highly recommend Our Souls at Night and all of Haruf's novels.

After You by Jojo Moyes

I heard that the sequel to Me Before You was even better than the first. I did enjoy it just as much.

The book picks up when Louisa is working as a waitress again, after her travels that began at the end of the other book. She enjoys waitressing -- which is hard for me to imagine since I am, I believe, pretty much the worst waitress in the world. I'm too forgetful.

It continues with Louisa trying to figure out what to do next in her life. She liked traveling but after a while decided she had had enough of that. She starts going to a grief therapy group and those people become her friends. Also through one of them she meets a new man who becomes an important part of her life. Her parents go through a crisis but they also grow close to her again through a close call that Louisa goes through. And Louisa meets a daughter of her previous love who neither he nor anyone else knew about it. This leads to more connections with his family.

So, as you can tell, it's an eventful book. It kept me turning the pages. I was interested in what Louisa would do and her thought process for making decisions about what direction to go. Besides being event-filled, Moyers writes with some humor as well. I definitely recommend both these books.

Felicity by Mary Oliver

I have just started reading this book of poetry by Mary Oliver. It's wonderful. Here's one for you to enjoy, and I have a few questions, too, you can weigh in on.

Roses
by Mary Oliver

Everyone now and again wonders about
those questions that have no ready
answers: first cause, God's existence,
what happens when the curtain goes
down and nothing stops it, not kissing,
not going to the mall, not the Super
Bowl.

 "Wild roses," I said to them one morning.
"Do you have the answers? And if you do,
would you tell me?"

The roses laughed softly. "Forgive us,"
they said. "But as you can see, we are
just now entirely busy being roses."

I love the image of the wild roses, of them laughing and talking. Their answer is so good - "entirely busy being roses."

There's one part that I don't understand. Where it says "what happens when the curtain goes / down and nothing stops it, not kissing, / not going to the mall, not the Super / Bowl." I think that the part about the curtain going down is one in the list of "questions that have no ready answer," like "first cause" and "God's existence." Then it seems like the phrases about not kissing and the mall and Super Bowl would be things that don't stop the curtain from going down.

But that's what I don't get. What do those actions (kissing, going to the mall and the Super Bowl) have to do with stopping the curtain going down, with stopping one of the hard questions to answer?

Maybe she's saying actions of that kind don't stop life from continuing on to death (death being the curtain going down)? Not understanding doesn't take away how much I like this poem, but it does make me curious.

Any thoughts?

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

I'm not exactly sure why I liked this book so much, but I did. I read it almost in one setting. You could call it predictable; The end was not a surprise by any means. And maybe you could even call it a little schmaltzy, since it's a love story that makes you cry.

Somehow, though, I did like it a lot. It's the story of a young woman in Great Britain who loses her job, then is hired as a caretaker/companion for a rich young man, Will, who is a paraplegic.

The main character is the young woman, Louisa. It is written in first person, from her point of view. But there are a few parts where the first person is one of the other characters.

One reason I liked the book is I liked Louisa. I liked listening to her narration. She has a good sense of humor and she feels like a person who I would like to know. 

A big part of the book is that Will wants to die. I hesitate to even write that because it makes the book sound maudlin. It did make me cry, but it didn't feel like a tear-jerker to me. I felt like I learned more about what it feels like to be a paraplegic like Will. Of course there's no way to really understand, but there were definitely insights I had never thought of.

I liked all the characters in the book. I see there is a sequel and others who have read it say they liked the sequel, too, some even better than the first. I plan to read it, too.

The Arsonist by Sue Miller

The Arsonist was recommended to me by "the librarian", my friend at Sinaloa Cafe where we go for Mexican dinner nearly every Friday. Way back years ago when I met her it was because she was reading a book while we were waiting for a table. I asked her what she was reading, and that started a friendship that includes exchanging book recommendations nearly every time we see each other.

Aileen was a librarian at a school when I met her. She and her husband are retired now. We don't see them every Friday, but they are regulars at Sinaloa, just as we are.

This Friday Aileen recommended The Arsonist and You Before Me. I ordered both of them and started with The Arsonist, which I finished yesterday.

When I read the summary on the back of the book, I thought it would be a mystery. That's why I chose to read it first, because I enjoy mysteries. I would not call it a mystery, though. There definitely is a mystery involved -- who is the arsonist -- but even though the fact that there are fires set by an arsonist as a central part of the book, the story is not about figuring out who is setting the fires.

The story is set in "a New Hampshire village" (says the synopsis on the back of the book), Winslow. The main character is Frankie Rowley, whose family has a summer home there, and where now her parents are living year round. Frankie is in her forties, single, and has a career as an aid worker in Africa. When she goes back to Winslow at the beginning of the book, she is not sure whether she'll go back to Africa or not, nor is she sure of what she will do at all.

I hesitated to write "the main character" because two other characters are featured prominently and the author reveals their thoughts and feelings, in the same way she does Frankie's. One of these is Frankie's mother, Sylvia, and the other is her romantic interest in the story, the town's newspaper editor, Bud. Frankie is the main character, but I feel like Bud is a close second, and Sylvia is in third place.

I like the writing, and I thought the story was compelling -- I wanted to keep turning the pages and find out what was going to happen. It's set in nearly present time, but not quite. There are no cell phones, but there are pagers. Some of the sources of uncertainty, making you want to keep reading, are the growth of Bud and Frankie's relationship, her growing awareness of her father's dwindling mental capacities, her mother's feelings toward her husband (Frankie's father), the differences of the town "year-rounders" vs. the summer people, and, of course, the mystery of the fires.

All in all, I recommend the book as a good read. I wouldn't consider it a contender to be a favorite, but I enjoyed it and I could even see myself re-reading it at some point in the future.

Delicious Sentences

I have a friend who posted this on Facebook:

"She enjoyed registering her fellow citizens' neuroses, intimacies, and habits, plotting them on a scale of decency, and knowledgeably passing on her opinions to others. She was generous in that regard." Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop.
What delicious sentences.

I thought about what my friend had written as I was re-reading Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym. It is full of delicious sentences. Some examples below:

"But I've never thought of myself as caring for canons," said Jane rather wildly.

"What are we having for supper?" asked her husband.
"Flora is in the kitchen unpacking some of the china. We could open a tin," added Jane, as if this were a most unusual procedure, which it most certainly was not.

"I suppose old atheists seem less wicked and dangerous than young ones," said Jane. "One feels that there is something of the ancient Greece in them."
Father Lomax, who evidently thought no such thing, let the subject drop.

Jane often thinks or says things "wildly." Little comments like "as if this were a most unusual procedure, which it most certainly was not" and "who evidently thought no such thing." Delicious.

Between You and Me by Mary Norris

I just started this book but I want to write out a quote already. Mary Norris calls herself a "comma queen" at the New Yorker. She checks the grammar and other aspects of stories in the magazine.

In this quote Norris is talking about autocorrect, and it made me laugh out loud.

Autocorrect I could do without. It thinks I am stupid and clumsy, and while it's true that I don't know how to disable it and I can't text with my thumbs like a teenager (though I am prehensile), why would I let a machine tell me what I want to say? I text someone "Good night" in German, and instead of "Gute Nacht" I send "Cute Nachos." I type "adverbial," and it comes out "adrenal," which is like a knife thrust to my adverbial gland. Invited to dinner, I text my friend to ask whether I can bring anything, and she replies that the "food and dissertation" are under control. Good news, I guess. I understand to bring wine and not ask anyone the topic of his PhD thesis.

Fiction is fun

It's turned out to be quite a long time since I've read a novel (a new one; I've been doing a lot of re-reading lately). I kind of forgot how fun it is to read a really good story, and just enjoy the story.

Yesterday I finished A Dangerous Place, by Jacqueline Winspear, the latest of the "Maisie Dobbs" novels she writes. It was great, as have been all the others.

Today I started reading The Bartender's Tale by Ivan Doig. I am enjoying it so much! I've only just started but loving it so far. I was lying in bed this morning thinking over what I've read so far and wondering about what will happen next. I haven't done that in a while, either. It's been a pretty happy, kid-growing-up kind of story so far and I was lying there thinking that eventually probably something bad or sad will happen. There has to be a climax coming at some point, right?

Anyway, I'm having fun. I recommend both books. I'll try to come back and blog more thoroughly about them later.

Georgette Heyer Makes Me Laugh

This is one of the reasons I love reading books by Georgette Heyer: They make me laugh.

Today I am re-reading Faro's Daughter. Who knows how often I've read it already? I keep these books on a shelf by my bed and grab them to read over and over.

A passage I just read made me laugh aloud. The main character, Deb Grantham, and her aunt, Lady Bellingham, are hiding Phoebe Laxton, a young, rather foolish woman, in their home. Phoebe has just been discovered by her persecutor and is so frightened at being seen that she faints when she runs to tell Deb and Lady Bellingham. They succeed in waking her and try to find out what happened to scare her so.

First there is the passage where Phoebe faints and Lady Bellingham is trying to figure out how to revive her:

'Oh, heavens, if it is not one thing it is another!' wailed her ladyship, looking round wildly for the vinaigrette. 'Untie her laces! Where are those salts? Why is nothing ever where it is wanted? Ring the bell! Oh no, the hartshorn is in that cupboard! I shall go distracted! You ought to burn some feathers under her nose, but there are only the new ostrich plumes in my best hat, and really---- However, take them if you like! I am sure I do not grudge them!'

I must admit I snorted as I wrote this. Not very ladylike, I know, but it cracks me up. Barbara Pym also uses "wildly" in this way. Her characters sometimes speak or think "wildly" like Lady Bellingham does here. And I love the way her ladyship is willing to sacrifice her ostrich feathers. Too funny.

The book goes on to describe Deb and Lady Bellingham's unsuccessful attempts to calm Phoebe down with reason and reassurances. They are quite frustrated that nothing they say makes any difference. Then Phoebe's fiance, Lord Mablethorpe, comes in and learns of the problem.

...his brows drew together across the bridge of his beautiful nose, and he said with more decision than Deborah had ever before heard in his voice: 'That settles it, then!'
    Miss Laxton [Phoebe] heaved a huge sigh, and tucked her hand in his. 'I knew you would know what to do!'
    'Well, it's to be hoped he does,' said Lady Bellingham, with some asperity. 'If I had known that all you wanted was to hear someone say that settles it, I would have said it myself for I am sure it is easy enough to say, and doesn't signify in the least!'

I find that quite hilarious. "Asperity" itself is just a funny word. And the absurdity that if her ladyship -- or anyone -- had just said that settles it, all would have been well.

I only know a few other people who love Georgette Heyer novels like I do. My best friend from high school, Cindy B, was the one who discovered them and told me about them; my sister Jan shares my enjoyment; my good friend Gert Bamford also was one of the rare people who not only had heard of Georgette Heyer but, like me, often tested the worthiness of used bookstores by checking to see if they carried Georgette Heyers.

One time when I was sad and scared about some health tribulations going on, my sister was trying to comfort me on the phone. She said, "I wish there was something I could do to help, Mave." I asked her to bring over some of the Georgette Heyer books she owned. Jan said she would bring them all and, "You be the keeper of our Georgette Heyer books." It makes me tear up to think about. What sisterly love.

 

Links:
On Georgette Heyer
Georgette-Heyer.com
Wikipedia
Amazon author page

Searching for Sunday by Rachel Held Evans

I loved this book! I love Rachel Held Evans so I had pre-ordered it when Held-Evans announced it was coming. It's full of memorable statements like the one below.

The book is divided into 7 sections, for 7 sacraments: Baptism, Confesion, Holy Orders, Communion, Confirmation, Anointing of the Sick, and Marriage.

In the prologue, Rachel talks of how "religious folk have always had it out for us night owls." I am not a night owl myself, but my daughter is and I thought of her as I read, "'...At the break of light it [the Church] rememebers the morning on which death and sin lay prostrated in defeat and new life and salvation were given to mankind.' This comes as unfortunate news for someone like me who can barely remember who she is at the 'break of light,' much less ponder the theological implications of the resurrection...No doubt I would have shooed poor Mary Magdalene away with a soft, pillow-muffled grunt had she asked me to help her bring the burial spices to the tomb that fateful morning two thousand years ago. I'd have slept right through the Main Event."

Later, still in the prologue, she writes about some reasons she feels people are leaving the church: "We don't want to choose between science and religion and between our intellectual integrit and our faith...When our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends aren't welcome at the table, then we don't feel welcome either..."

My own theory about why people aren't coming to church goes beyond what the church has or has not to offer. That's definitely a factor. But I feel, actually it's more practical than that -- they don't feel like setting the alarm on a weekend day and having to get up, get dressed, and go somewhere. But that's a whole different subject I won't go into right now.

The subtitle of this book is "loving, leaving, and finding the church." A big part of Held Evans' life story is that she grew up in an evangelistic church her father pastored, was very gung-ho, excelling in the Biblical pursuits espoused by the church, and believing wholeheartedly everything taught there. Then as she grew older and started being exposed through books and life to many other types of beliefs and conflicting values, she started to wonder and doubt about the teachings of the evangelistic church.

This book talks of leaving the evangelical tradition and looking for a church she felt better matched her beliefs, yet also coming to terms with the evangelical church that is her heritage, and even realizing she loved that history and needed it.

A great quote from the baptism chapter: "The good news is you are a beloved child of God; the bad news is you don't get to choose your siblings." So funny because it's so true.

Held Evans talks in this chapter about the feeling that you are not fit for church membership until you've conquered your "demons" -- the sin in your hearts. She writes: "demons are as real as the competing identities that seek to possess us. But rather than casting them out of our churches, we tend to invite them in, where they tell us we'll be children of God when

•  we beat the addiction.
• we sign the doctrinal statement
• we help with the children's ministry
• we get our act together.
• we tithe.
• we play by the rules.
• we believe without doubt.
• we are married. 
• we are straight.
• we are religious.
• we are good."

I had not thought of sin or demons that way. I know there is sin in the world and in our hearts. I just hadn't thought of them in such a concrete way, as devils or demons.

And, "...sometimes I think what the church needs most is to recover some of its weird...In the ritual of baptism, our ancestors acted out the bizarre truth of the Christian identity: We are people who stand totally exposed before evil and death and declare them powerless against love. There's nothing normal about that."

Rachel writes about doubt coming in to her life, "like an invasive species, like kudzu trellising the bran: What if none of this is true? What if it's all one big lie?"  I can related to this kind of doubt. Over the years I would periodically go into a kind of season of doubt. Now, though, I am usually successful in avoiding those seasons. I was in a doubting season when I heard that my brother had ALS. I decided then that I did not want to think any more about doubt; that I would believe like a child. It was and is basically mind control. When those kinds of thoughts start sneaking into my brain, I start thinking about other things. For this situation, I usually start thinking about my blessings and all the things I believe without doubt. 

In another place in this book, Held Evans says, "people bond more deeply over shared brokenness than they do over shared beliefs." That struck me as true. It is in her chapter nine, called "Dirty Laundry." I know we shouldn't try to present a perfect church face to the world, however there definitely have been times where I felt that, even if I was inclined to invite someone to my church, I could not do it because I was too afraid they'd find out my church (at that time) did not let women be elders or ministers, or I had a fear that my minister (at that time) might say something I was ashamed of and that would be offensive. Yet I get the sentiment that Rachel wrote, "I've heard many recovering alcoholics say they've never found a church quite like Alcoholics Anonymous. They've never found a community of people so honest with one another about their pain, so united in their shared brokenness." How do we strike a balance between not airing our diry laundry and being that shared-brokenness-community of love to each other?

I love this phrase, too, "broken and beloved."

This blog entry is about just the beginning of the book. It's chock full of more and deeper thoughts, as well as interesting, funny stories. I highly, highly recommend it.

The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

Can you imagine this woman, Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, is the first person featured in this history of technology - the internet and computers? I read about Lord Byron in the Georgette Heyer Regency novels that I love. He was a famous, romantic novelist. In this book, The Innovators, it sounds as if he married for money and the marriage did not last long. Ada's mother must have disliked Bryon a lot because she had Ada tutored in Math in order to "counteract" any tendencies Ada might have to poetry.

It turned out Ada had a love for the poetry of mathematics and science. I did not know this but it turns out that Steve Jobs always featured an image of the intersection of technology and liberal arts when he gave demos of new products. The book had this intersection as a theme, writing about the many different people who exemplified that intersection, and who built on each others' ideas to develop computers, networking and the internet.

Walter Isaacson wrote a biography of Steve Jobs that was a bestseller, and that I also read. It was great. I was thinking at first to describe The Innovators as a bunch of short biographies. But really, it's a biography of technology.

One of the things that surprised me as I read it was the communal aspect of the technology world. When they said, "Power to the people," they meant it. Or many of them did. Many of the creators and inventors who were a part of the development of technology strongly believed in NOT having a central authority that determined rules and so on. They believed in spreading the control throughout the system, with no one person or entity in charge. There was even an early technology company called "The Love and Grace Company."

The structure of the internet is kind of like a fishnet, with multiple paths from one thing to another. There's a piece of equipment in our server room, and millions of other server rooms, called a "router" because that's truly what it is. It routes the data from place to place. And if one router goes down, the data is routed around it.

I was also surprised by the women featured in the book, who were integral parts of the growth of technology. There were a team of women who did the programming of the huge, early computers. They configured the pathways and plugged the cables in and out to program the computers manually. They were usually very much unacknowledged, but they still loved their work.

There's a story of the "mother of all demos" that early inventors had in order to show others the power of computers. It is mentioned not only in the history itself, as an event and what happened, but often referred to by people who attended it as being a big influence for them. For this demo, 4 women did the programming and worked 24x7. The book recounts how the night before the demo they were all exhausted and even though there was still an unsolved problem, they had to go home and go to bed. One woman woke up at 4am with the solution in her head and she went over to the room at that wee hour in the morning to put in the fix.

But these women were not even invited to the demo. There was a big dinner afterward to celebrate and the women were not included. As the men went off to their dinner, the women walked to their hotels in the cold. Sheesh. However, one of those women was in the Navy, became a brigadier general, and had the longest career of anyone in the Navy.

With my work being in the technology arena, it's not surprising I found the book interesting. But I think people not even as geeky as I am would enjoy it, too. It's about people and how they worked together and alone, how they built on each others' ideas, how ideas came to them, how technology involved, the culture surrounding them -- so much more than just how computers were invented.

I highly recommend it.

Scary Close by Donald Miller

I pre-ordered this book when I read about it coming out. Partly I pre-ordered it because I read Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller but also because if you pre-ordered it you got two freebies with it, the ebook of Blue Like Jazz, and a soundtrack of 16 songs that Miller made in honor of the book. The sound track seemed like a fun idea. I just downloaded it and started to play it for the first time.

It turned out, though, that I liked the book more than I'd even expected I would. I kind of devoured it. I have been thinking a lot about how to be more...essential? ...transparent? ...vulnerable? Not sure of the best word. I think of it as "Mavis being Mavis," not trying to be someone or something I'm not, not worrying so much about what other people might think of me or what I say or do.

This book fed right into this line of thinking. Miller wrote about the process of changing himself while falling in love with his now wife, Betsy. It's about relationships and things he learned about how to be good at relationships. It talks a lot about marriage and falling in love, but you can take what he writes about and apply it to any relationship.

When my brother Dan died, as I've written about before, one of the many things I realized was how important relationships are. It was beautiful to see Dan's friends, including co-workers, and family surround him with faithfulness and love. It made me not just realize but start to live with the priority of building good relationships with whoever is in my life. This book is full of thoughts and stories about how to do that.

It's got some helpful kind of self help type of tips, like 5 kinds of manipulation, but I didn't really feel like I was reading a self help book. It felt like Donald Miller was just talking to me about what he went through and learned. He has a friendly style of writing. It never bored me or seemed like a slog.

I think it'd be a good one for my two sons and wife and girlfriend. There are even online courses for pre-marriage, marriage and parenting. Quite a package deal.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson

Loved, loved, loved it. It inspired me to read 2 more of Robinson's books, Home and Gilead. I'm going to try to write about Gilead later.

Lila is set in Gilead, at least the present-day part of it is. Home, too, is set in the town of Gilead, as is, of course, Gilead. I like it when authors write books that interlace the way these 3 do. There are different main characters, different plots, different times, but it's kind of like catching glimpses of old friends from other books. Barbara Pym does a good job with this, too.

Lila is the name of, and story of, the woman who becomes the wife of Reverend Ames, the main character in Gilead. She's a strange character. She grew up very poor, mostly looked after by a woman named Doll. Doll and Lila lived a kind of hobo life. The book begins when Lila is alone, grown, and staying in an abandoned house in the town of Gilead.

It's been quite a while since I read the book and I had to take a look to remember if the book was written in first person or not. Even though it is not, it kind of felt like you were inside Lila's head, and seeing the unfolding of events from her perspective.

You follow the progression of her relationship with "the Reverend," as she calls him. It is a strange coupling, it seems. They are so different. Yet there is a lot of attraction between them, and they do love each other. Reverend Ames, who knows so much about theology and faith, and who is so much older than Lila, is fascinated by her even though she is so "un-scholarly" compared to him, and kind of "un-eloquent," too. But she's wise. And she loves him, too.

It's hard for me to write about Lila in a way that makes it sound interesting. I'm not sure what to say. Partly, it is such a good book because Marilynne Robinson is such a good writer. It always sounds kind of off-putting to me when someone says they love a book because the writing is so good. It makes me imagine beautiful descriptive passages. They ARE beautiful, but I often start to skim them as I get involved in the story and just want to read for the story, not the writing.

Maybe instead of saying it's so good because of the writing, I could say it's because of Robinson's wonderful way with words. I am all about the story, especially in fiction, and Robinson writes so that I do get into the story. Yet, without making me annoyed by moving away from the story, she fits in flashbacks and passages of inner thoughts.