Hiroshima in the Morning by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

Hiroshima in the Morning

A friend was reading this book and said she wished someone else would read it so she could talk about it. She said a little bit about it and I thought it sounded good so I ordered it.

My friend had said that many of the reviews of Hiroshima in the Morning were all about how the author went to Japan and ended up leaving her husband and children. I was interested to hear that happen "live," when another friend said something like that when I mentioned I was reading this book. She said something along the lines of it being a book about a woman who goes by herself to Japan and discovers she likes it so much she leaves her husband and children.

I don't think that's quite an adequate summary of what the book is about. The author does go to Japan by herself, leaving her husband and two young children at home in New York City. She goes to do research for a novel she plans to write that includes the things that happened to Japanese-Americans who came back to Hiroshima right after the bomb. She was inspired by the life of her Aunt Molly. Molly was an American citizen who, like other Japanese American people, was interned during the war. Then she goes to Japan right after the bombing and sees all the devastation that caused. Then eventually she went back to the US to live the rest of her life. The author wrote, "Aunt Molly may, at that point, have been one of the few people still alive who had lived the unique Japanese American triptych of the internment, the American occupation of Japan and the atomic bomb aftermath."

At the beginning of the book the author explains that she applied for a grant she found in a journal, after being urgently encouraged to do so by her husband. To her surprise, she wins the grant and finds herself planning to leave for 6 months in Japan. She and her husband married when she was just 17, and by this point had two little boys. She writes about how she had never actually lived by herself before, and when she was first in Hiroshima on her own, she started thinking about her girlhood in Hawaii and says, "Solitude has led me back to the last time in my life when choice was not collective."

I thought that was an interesting sentence. I can relate to the feeling of freedom when I am on my own and can decide what I'll do based only on what I want, rather than wondering and trying to guess what my husband would want. When I'm with my husband I don't actually notice the "collective decision" process, but when I'm not, I do notice the difference.

As she is doing her research in Japan, the author is also working through the loss of her mother. She starts to feel her mother's presence beside her, in a way. But as time goes on, she loses that feeling of her mother's process. It seems to be a part of her process of learning to be on her own.

At first she can hardly stand the homesickness of not being with her husband and children. She and her husband are both heartbroken and even wonder why she ever decided to leave. When 9/11 happens, it deepens those feelings. At one point the boys both get the flu and the husband has to deal with two children throwing up all over, cleaning them and the house up all on his own.

After a while he begins to resent the fact that he's carrying the entire burden alone, and doesn't even read or listen to her talk about what she's accomplishing. When he and the boys come to visit her in Japan, it's pretty much a fiasco. A few times she needs to meet with people for whom she's waited a long time to get an appointment, and he doesn't see why her work should take precedence at any time while they are there visiting.

She draws a comparison of the before and after of her relationship with her husband, 9/11 and Hiroshima and the bomb:

So there is that moment, then; the last breath of before: when life is about to change, utterly and forever, into something we have no way to conceive of. When the trajectory is already being drawn and there is no way to stop it.

Have we been living in that moment all along?

This talk of the "before moment" sticks in my mind. It goes along with my constant feeling that we never know what will happen in the next moment or hour or day of our lives. This feeling started when my brother called to tell me he had been diagnosed with ALS, and then 6 months later he was gone. One moment he was there, then he wasn't. We never know what's around the next curve; all we do know is that Christ will be there with us.

I didn't see in the book exactly when the author and her husband actually divorced, but I assume they did. In the book she ends when she goes back home after the six months. The afterword is 10 years later and she just says that her "marriage unravels." She calls the book a memoir, and that's what it is, a memoir of her 6 months in Japan.

I found the author to be a sympathetic person. Reading her thoughts and memories as she is living away from her husband and children, I feel convinced that she loves them. I don't feel like I can condemn her for deciding to leave them, and that isn't the central subject of her memoir, although coming to the point where you can see that her marriage is unravelling is a part of the story, for sure.

It was interesting to read about her finding her way in Japan, not easy in Hiroshima where many people do not speak English. It was also very interesting to read the accounts from the people who lived through the bomb. At first when she tried to get the witnesses' stories, they seemed to kind of recite a story, but after 9/11 they opened up more and told honest, more open stories of what they had seen and how they had felt. Incredible what they went through.

When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson's website

As I was reading this book I realized I had "met" one of the characters before -- Jackson Brodie. I saw "Case Histories" on "Masterpiece Theater" and thought it was good. It was fun to run across him again. Now I plan to track him down in all the books he's in.

Don't you love that the British love mysteries? I'm so glad they respect them and seem to afford their authors as much respect as novelists and other writers. I'm an anglophile and a always attracted to a British mystery. My Netflix queue is full of them. My son is disgusted that every time he turns around we're watching another one.

Anyway, When Will There Be Good News was a good book. It starts with the story of a horrible, random murder of a mother and 2 of her children as they were walking home from the bus stop. The 3rd child, the middle daughter, runs away, hides in the tall wheat and survives. After telling that story it cuts to a man who seems to be stalking a little boy and possibly preparing to kidnap him. Then it starts a chapter named "The Life and Adventures of Reggie Chase, Containing a Faithful Account of the Fortunes, Misfortunes, Uprisings, Downfallings, and Complete Career of the Chase Family." Reggie is a young woman working as a nanny for Dr. Hunter.

Pretty soon all of this connects and you realize who is who. It may sound confusing but I promise you if I can understand it, anyone can. I don't often work hard to retain a lot of details as I'm reading -- or maybe I should say I am not able to retain a lot of details as I'm reading -- and I got what was going on and the back stories with no problem. Probably most people would have understood it all sooner, but, whatever, it's not an issue, in fact it's just a fun book to read.

I liked the characters. It was fun to be in Reggie's head and hear what and how she thought. Jackson Brodie is a good character who's interesting to get to know. He's an ex-detective, by the way, who ends up being instrumental in solving the mystery. Louise, the actual detective, is also someone I liked getting acquainted with. Even the minor characters, even the ones who do bad things, are well written.

As far as the plot, Dr. Hunter and her baby disappear and Reggie is pretty much the only one who doesn't believe Dr. Hunter's husband's story that she went to be with a sick aunt. There's a big railroad crash that eventually connects Reggie with Jackson, and she also tries to get Louise to investigate the disappearance. At first Louise dismisses Reggie, but she comes around.

I pretty much devoured the book, just kept reading and turning the pages and loving being in it. I believe I'll be starting a Kate Atkinson "jag" any day now.

Still by Lauren Winner

Lauren Winner's website

I heard Lauren Winner speak at the Faith & Writing Festival one year. It was several years ago and she seemed quite young but I liked her a lot. I liked the way she just said whatever, even if it wasn't something you'd expect from a literary, highly educated writer.

This book, Still, has the subtitle "Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis." It's written shortly after Winner divorced her husband of, I think, 7 years. Winner grew up "with a Jewish father and a lapsed Baptist mother who had agreed to raise my sister and me as Jews." She writes that she loved Judaism and everything that went with it - the food, the songs, even "every letter of the Hebrew alphabet." But in college she had a dream about Jesus, read Jan Karon's Mitford novels, bought a Book of Common Prayer and after graduating from college she was baptized. After seeing her at the Festival I read and enjoyed her book Girl Meets God: On the Path to Spiritual Life.


I suppose you could compare Lauren Winner to Anne Lamott, who I love, but I didn't even think of that until now, when I was trying to figure out how to write about Winner and this book. It is a memoir about faith, as some of Lamott's books have been, but Winner has a very different style of writing. She's more serious, for one, although not heavy or preachy or anything like that.

Winner is writing about "middle" in this book. She feels she's in a mid-Faith crisis, when she is no longer as certain and joyful in her faith as she was in the past. Yet even while she expresses doubt, I never felt she'd lost her faith. One thing I thought was notable is that she continued to go to church, to kind of go through the motions, even when she didn't feel like it, and she found that was good. It helped. That's good to hear.

I liked all the meditations and musings on the word "middle." I had never heard of the "middle voice," a grammatical term. She says that we don't have the middle voice in English but it's found in ancient Greek, Sanskrit and some other languages. She says it's "somewhere between the agent and the one acted upon. When you have something done to you. I will have myself carried. I will have myself saved." She said she started listening for hints of the middle in English and heard it in sentences like "That scotch drank smoothly; politicians bribe easily." She says the middle voice is used "when the subject has some caracteristic, some quality, that makes it partly responsible for whatever has happened in the sentence...The subject is changed....but the subject is not just being...acted upon; something in its own qualities...is necessary for the action, too--if the scotch weren't smooth, it wouldn't drink well."

I don't know why I think that is so interesting, but I do. She writes about middle verbs being verbs that "name a change in bodily posture but not much motion (lie down, kneel). Also...verbs for speech actions with emotional overtones (confess), verbs of cognition (think), and verbs of spontaneous happening (grow, become, change) and she says "these middle verbs...are religious; they are the very actions that constitute a religious life: to forgive, to imagine, to grow, to yearn, to lament, to meet, to kneel." Cool. Never thought of that.

Finally she writes, "If I could make English speak middle, I would use it to say this: I wait; I doubt; as the deer yearns for a drink of water, so I yearn. I long. I praise."


I highlighted this quote from a historian Christopher Grasse who, she said, was writing about the religious late-eighteenth-century America: "Faith...meant more than intellectual assent to a set of doctrines. It was a commitment of the whole self, a hope and trust that, if genuine, ought to be the foundation of an entire way of life and vision of the world."

I also liked this: "I am not a saint. I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God."

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"Fresh Air" interview w Isaacson

Steve Jobs is a fascination. He was so mysterious. You heard so many rumors about him, you saw him on t.v., you heard him quoted, you were amazed at the products his company produced, he was like a rock star for many of his years yet he disappeared from the news for quite a space of time. He started Apple, they kicked him out, he came back, Apple became amazing.

Reading this biography was very enjoyable to me. I wanted to know more about Steve Jobs, what he was like as a person and as the man who ran Apple. It was great that Jobs gave Isaacson so much access to himself.

I came away thinking that it would have been hard to live or work for Jobs. I have a feeling I would have been unhappy if I'd actually ever been around him. He was unkind, more than that he was just plain mean to people. He loved his wife and kids but he was still odd and basically selfish.

One thought in my mind after reading about how Apple started and some of the people who worked there and had the ideas that produced the products such as the ipod, ipad, the Mac and so on was I wondered if he, or Apple, would have been as successful as they were if he had not been such a difficult person to work for. Would they have succeeded if he'd actually treated his co-workers with respect?

Some people who worked for him said they didn't think so. They felt like when he made them feel so bad, it inspired them to prove him wrong. I'm sure that's true for some people. But I thought that one incident in the book showed he probably could have succeeded without being so mean. There was one time when Jobs was talking to a supplier about what he wanted. The supplier was saying there was no way he could give Jobs the product he wanted and no way do it in the time Jobs wanted. Jobs stared at him in the way he was famous for staring at people, and said something like yes, he could do it. And he told the supplier not to be afraid, he knew he could do it. And the supplier did it. To me, that shows that he could have worked that way with others and gotten results, too. But who knows?

Anyway, I thought it was a good book. I plan to reread it sometime to refresh myself on the details. There's no doubt he was an incredible person who made a company that created some amazing things.

Blue Nights by Joan Didion

New York Times Article

I liked Joan Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking and I liked this one, too. They are similar in that they are both memoirs about the death of a beloved family member. Magical Thinking was written during the year after her husband suddenly and unexpectedly died, and Blue Nights is about surviving the death of her daughter, who died tragically young.

You'd think these would be depressing books but for some reason they did not affect me that way. When other people say about a book that it has beautiful writing, I immediately become skeptical that I won't like the book. I'm all about the story, I think, and often say. But these books by Joan Didion are not books with a story of the traditional sort - with the beginning at the beginning, then the middle, then the end. They are like listening to Didion's thoughts.

I could say that I like them because she so eloquently says what I feel, what I think we all feel when such sad, inexplicable things happen. One of the reasons I admire writers is their ability to do that -- to express what I feel, but so much better than I can. And that is one of the reasons I like these books.

But you wouldn't think that would be enough to make you turn the pages and keep reading the whole book. Just because she is so good at expressing feelings isn't enough. But I can't really figure out how to say much more than that about why I like the books.

Another thing that makes my liking of the books somewhat surprising is that Joan Didion has no faith, or at least she does not profess any faith or belief. She doesn't even bring up the subject of what she believes. She certainly does not say that her faith is giving her strength and helping her to get through these tragic events. And it seems impossible to me to even understand how anyone can get through things like this without faith. Yet I admire the way she gets through them.

I read this book from Kindle on my iPad. A nice little bonus in that format is it includes three videos of Joan Didion reading chapters 1, 2 and 7. The filmmaker does a good job showing scenes of Joan in her apartment, in New York, the city skyline, and so on. I love the smell, feel and look of paper books, but I do also love the richness of this kind of additional material in digital books.

True Compass by Edward M. Kennedy

So, yeah, this is Ted Kennedy's memoir. I probably would not have picked it from a shelf, but someone loaned it to me and said they'd enjoyed it. Now I can't remember who loaned it to me. I thought it was my friend Sally but she says it's not her. I can picture her face in my mind telling me she'd gravitated to the biographies and picked this up -- but I've got the wrong face in my brain. Hopefully it'll come to me or someone will ask.

Anyway, I did enjoy the book. It was interesting to read about him growing up in that nearly mythical Kennedy family. Ted was quite a lot younger than Jack and Robert but he was highly influenced by them. And they did a lot for him.

I liked the tone of Ted Kennedy's book. He wasn't bragging and he wasn't being defensive. He seemed to be trying to be honest. I believe that by the time he was writing this he knew he was near the end of his life.

I wondered what he'd write about the "Chappaquiddick incident." He didn't go into a lot of detail, but he did tell the story. I actually never heard any accounting of the whole story -- only the bits about how he had gotten himself out of the water but not the woman he was with, Mary Jo Kopechne.

He wrote that they were only acquaintances who'd met that night at a gathering. When she needed a ride to the ferry, he was happy to have the excuse to leave. Then there was the accident and the car slipped off a bridge into the water. He says that he can't even remember how he got out of the car and he dived back in for Mary Jo many times and couldn't see her. He hoped she'd gotten out but was afraid she hadn't; he got help and others also dived in and could not see her.

About the hours after the accident he wrote that they have been "copiously recorded....my devising and rejecting scenarios with Joe and the others...; swimming across the channel...; elaying in reporting the accident. My actions were inexcusable." He also said he's lived with the guilt of causing an innocent woman's death for years and felt that he should atone for it.

After reading about all that he did and tried to do, I think it's a shame that he was not able to make the big changes in healthcare that he was working for. I wish he would have succeeded. Our healthcare is so terribly messed up, and he did honestly seem to have devoted most of his political life to trying to ensure that everyone, regardless of their income or status, would have the basic health care that everyone needs.

The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas

Our book club chose this "old school" book. Alexandre Dumas is most famous for having written The Three Musketeers. This book is much shorter than that one.

It's set in Holland, and the title is referring to an actual flower. The government offered a large prize to anyone who could produce a truly black tulip, and the quest to get that prize is central to the plot.

The beginning of the book is quite exciting. Two men are fleeing for their lives from a mob who thinks they are traitors and liars. To be honest, I wasn't quite sure what the two men did but some papers they had hidden with a friend led us into the actual story. That friend, Cornelius Van Baerle (Dutch enough for you?), is the main character.

Cornelius has not read the hidden papers, and has actually almost forgotten them. He took on a quiet life, devoting himself to gardening and breeding tulips, trying to produce that pure black tulip. Because of the papers he is arrested and put in jail. In prison he falls in love with the guard's daughter and entrusts her with the 3 bulbs that he is sure will produce a black tulip. His fiendish neighbor, though, is watching and determined to steal the bulb. He does, but his evil plans are foiled in the end.

This is a good story. It's a little old fashioned but not enough to bother you. The story moves along like a rollicking movie. I felt like I could see the characters, scenes, landscape and action in my mind. According to Wikipedia, it has been made into a movie and BBC miniseries. It'd be fun to see a movie version.

I'm glad to have read this. If you want a good, historical adventure, I recommend The Black Tulip.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

I didn't think I was going to like this book. I thought it might be old fashioned or boring or something but it turned out I did like it.

The book is set in Vietnam, in the 1950's, I believe, when the French were fighting there. The main characters are a British reporter, Fowler, and an American man, Pyle.

There's a sort of love story/love triangle but it's probably not fair to call it love. Fowler is living with a Vietnamese woman named Phuong and Pyle falls in love with her. Phuong wants to marry a man who will take her out of Vietnam. Once she feels that won't happen with Fowler, she goes with Pyle. That's why it might not really qualify as love.

The Whole World Over by Julia Glass

I enjoyed this book. The main character is Greenie, wife of Alan, mother of George. They live in a small apartment in New York. Greenie started her own business as a baker, and Alan is a psychoanalyst. George is 4 years old.

Greenie gets a call from the assistant to New Mexico's governor who has tasted her coconut cake and fallen in love with it. He asks her to come to New Mexico and be his chef. She decides to do it, as a kind of adventure. She takes George and goes out to New Mexico. Alan stays in New York. Greenie ends up loving New Mexico and encourages Alan to join them so he begins to "wean" his patients (which are very few anyway) and prepares to move.

But that move doesn't happen. Greenie meets an old boyfriend and falls in love with him. She decides to separate from Alan. Some things happen that end up with Alan taking George back to New York with him. Then September 11 happens and everything changes again.

It sounds kind of shallow as I describe it, and I was kind of disgusted with Greenie for leaving Alan. But she still was a likeable character. There are a lot of other characters, too. The governor, his assistant, the restaurant owner next door, the bookstore owner across the street, a woman named Saga who has brain damage from an accident, memories of Greenie's mother. Somehow it all works. I liked the characters and the writing. It was a good story that kept me turning the pages. I enjoyed being in New York and New Mexico, especially New Mexico. I thought it was a good presentation of what marriage can feel like, too.

It was interesting to read a novel with September 11 as an event within it. That's a first for me. The author described one of the characters in New York looking out her window and seeing paper falling like snow. I suppose that happened. I had not thought of it, although I saw the photos of all the debris at the towers and on the people there at the scene. It sounds like paper fell in a similar way to ashes falling when a volcano happens.

I recommend this book, and I think I'll try another book by Julia Glass. The book references "the National Book Award-Winning" Three Junes. That sounds familiar; I'm not sure if I've read it or not.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell

I liked this book a lot. At first I thought it was kind of confusing. There were a lot of characters, and their names were either Japanese or Dutch, both kind of strange to remember, although the Dutch ones had a ring of familiarity. But it wasn't long before I was caught up in the story and enjoying it very much.

Jacob De Zoet works for the Dutch East Indies Company in Japan, in 1799. I didn't (and still don't) know much about this period of Japan's history, but the book talked about it being after Japan had thrown out all the Christians, and killed many, then tried to keep themselves isolated from the Western world. But they did allow the Dutch Indies Company to have this one port and conduct trade.

The Japanese were so anti-Christian that they actually had a holiday where the people stepped on a picture of Jesus and gave an oath to declare their hatred of Christianity. There were "Hidden Christians" who were killed if discovered. The people of the Dutch East Indies Company were not allowed to bring any religious material into the country. Jacob, though, smuggled in a Psalter, of the Dutch Reformed Church, which had been his great grandfather's. It had a bullet hole where the book had stopped a bullet while being carried by his great grandfather during a war. Jacob felt he could not be so disloyal as to give up that Psalter so he hid it among many other books and hoped it would not be discovered.

It turned out his translator did see it but did not inform on Jacob. This translator had loved and wanted to marry a woman named Aibagawa, but his family would not let him marry her. Aibagawa is a midwife and, rare for a Japanese woman, was studying medicine with a doctor from the company. Jacob becomes infatuated with her, but they cannot pursue a relationship either and Aibagawa is sent to what is almost like a convent run by a secret society.

The author goes back and forth between Jacob and Aibagawa as the story unfolds. He does a good job of telling enough from one character's perspective before changing to the other. I did not get at all frustrated at the switches. There are even a few places where other characters are telling the story and that works, too.

I thought it was interesting to be in another time and country like that, and to get to know these characters. I would definitely recommend it.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

So very British. That's this novel -- Anglophiles, you'll love it.

I was trying to underline very British-sounding sentences but, of course, I got caught up in the story and only remembered once or twice. Here are a few.

And yet there was that fine line across which one might be betrayed into womanish fretting over details...He decided that perhaps he would undertake a brief, manly attempt at carpentry...

...the color seemed incongruous, thought the Major, in a woman who preferred mushroom-brown tweeds. Today's dull burgundy and black blouse and dark green stockings would have rendered her invisible in any mildly wet woodland. 

"My dear lady, what is there to fear?" he said. "Except putting the other ladies quite in the shade."

"Oh, it's simple pragmatism, Dad. It's called the real world. If we refused to do business with the morally questionable,...then where would we all be?"  "On a nice dry spit of land known as the moral high ground?" suggested the Major.

The Major wished young men wouldn't think so much. It always seemed to result in absurd revolutionary movements or, as in the case of several of his former pupils, the production of very bad poetry.

The story is about Major Pettigrew who lives in a small British village. He is a widower with one grown son. When the story begins, the Major's brother has just died. He and his brother each have a "Churchill gun," a pair of valuable guns which their father had given them with the dying promise that they would be joined back together as a pair when one of the brothers died. The other main character is Jasmina Ali, a woman of Pakistani background who owns and runs a shop in the village. She, too, has lost her spouse and her nephew is helping her to run the shop, which sounds kind of like a 7-11, a convenience store where they have a little bit of everything but no one does their full shopping there.

The Major and Mrs. Ali start to enjoy each others' company. They both love books and they like to talk and spend time with each other. This is a little extraordinary because there is some prejudice against the two of them having a relationship, including from Jasmina's nephew and family.

There are several other characters who play a part in the story -- the Major's son, Mrs. Ali's nephew, a young woman who has a child who turns out to be the nephew's, a nice woman in the village who seems like a more perfect match for the Major, and the Lord of the manor in the village.

An exciting climax happens when the nephew threatens to kill himself. Everything isn't tied up into a completely happy ending for all concerned, but it definitely is wrapped up well & tidily at the end.

I highly recommend this book. I felt it was charming and just a joy to read.

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

I finished The Postmistress this week. I liked it a lot. It definitely kept me turning the pages. In fact, I finished it very late at night because I didn't want to stop reading.

The book starts with a kind of prelude where one of the characters is seemingly at a dinner party and asks, "What would you think of a postmistress who chose not to deliver the mail?" Those first couple pages are written in first person, by one of the main characters, Frances Bard, a woman who'd been a reporter with Edward Murrow, in England, in the years before the US joined World War II.

Then it switches to third person and gets into the full story. Most of the characters come from a small town in Maine. There's Iris, the postmistress (except the author says it is incorrect in the US to say postmistress even when the person is female); Emma a young wife of the town doctor; and Henry, Iris' boyfriend. The author begins with these Maine characters -- Iris realizing she's falling in love at  rather a late age with Henry, Emma ecstatic at being loved by her husband Will, the doctor, after a fairly unloved childhood.

We pick up with Frances, called Frankie, the reporter, in London. It doesn't state it explicitly but you get the feeling that Frankie is thrilled to be working with Murrow, living in such exciting times and reporting on it all.

The lives of the characters in Maine progress, and it's fun to read about it. Because of a crucial event in his career, the doctor decides to go to London to help in the war effort. When he and Frankie end up together in a bomb shelter, the stories and characters become connected.

I won't give away any more. I recommend the book. I felt like I got a little better feeling of what it felt like to be in that time, which seems kind of limbo-like to me just because the US wasn't in the war yet -- and how strange is that since I wasn't even alive then? Anyway, good writing, excellent storytelling, characters you like getting to know.

A note - Stars & Ebooks

I've decided to try to go back in the blog and use the labels to indicate a star rating, from 0 to 5, kind of like grades A through F. That way these ratings will be listed under "Labels" and it will be possible to find books by their rating.

On another subject, I've felt almost guilty that the last several books I've read have been on my iPad using Kindle. I love physical books. I love their smell and feel and look. I love sitting surrounded by them in my library. I feel conflicted about not purchasing them or going to the library for them. My plan is that if I think I'll re-read a book because I think it's so good, I will purchase it. And I know that I won't purchase all my books that way. It's a changing world. Even a big chain bookstore like Borders is going bankrupt. I wonder how it will all turn out.

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

Unbroken is by Laura Hillenbrand, who wrote Seabiscuit. I like both these books. Hillenbrand is a good writer who can make non-fiction interesting. I don't read as much non-fiction as fiction but I've always liked biographies because they are still a story.

My brother and father both mentioned reading this book, which is why I picked it up. It's about Louis Silvie Zamperini. I'd never heard of him but it turns out he was quite a famous runner. He came close to breaking the 4-minute mile record back in the days when everyone was trying to beat that mark.

The book tells about his childhood. It sounds like he was a naughty boy and got into more serious trouble in his teenage years, but his brother encouraged him to put his energies into running and that turned out to be something he could do well at. He went to the Olympics and would have continued competing in running except the war started -- World War II.

Louis joined up and became a bombadier. I never knew that the saying "bombs away" came from such a literal source. As a bombadier Louis would sit by the bomb doors, open them, and when the bombs had gone out he'd yell, "Bombs away!" so the pilot knew he could start climbing higher.

Louis was in the Pacific arena in the war. It was interesting to read about the way the war went over there, some of the strategies and reasons the U.S. was fighting for these islands, and also the way the mechanical abilities of the planes had a lot to do with those strategies. That may sound dry but, trust me, it wasn't, which is why I say that Hillenbrand is good at making non-fiction interesting.

Louis' plane was shot down and he was one of 3 survivors. The tale of their survival for more than 3 weeks on an inflatable raft is amazing. One of the 3 died during that time and then Louis and the other, the pilot, were captured. Japanese prisoners of war had a horrible time, much worse than those taken in Europe, another thing I had never known. Louis' experiences in prison were horrible and unforgettable.

After the war Louis' body had been so wrecked by prison that he couldn't go back to running. He bacame a kind of celebrity for the military but started drinking and went into a downward spiral. He also started to be obsessed about killing a particularly horrible Japanese officer who had singled Louis out for torture during the war. Hillenbrand also chronicles that officer's life.

Louis' wife persuaded him to attend a Billy Graham crusade. What Graham said affected him so much and reminded him of his childhood plus the promises he'd made to God during the war and he absolutely turned his life around. He opened a nonprofit boys camp where he helped boys learn how to turn their lives around, too. He also went on speaking tours and was given many awards. He lived a long, active life, even skiing at the age of 90.

As you read the book you get to know other people important in Louis' life, such as the pilot who survived the plane crash and prison with him, his brother, and others. I just found it very interesting to get to know Louis and these others and to hear how they lived and changed.

Never in My Wildest Dreams by Belva Davis

I read this book for a book club. My overall assessment is that it was good, rather more interesting because it is about a "local girl" but I didn't feel like it was extremely well written or compelling.

Belva Davis is a journalist/reporter in the Bay Area. She was born in Louisiana but nearly immediately was given to her Aunt Ophelia and her husband, who had no children, to be cared for by them. When Belva was 3 her aunt died and Belva then went back to her mother & father's home and for the rest of her childhood was shuffled around from one part of the family to another. She wasn't always badly treated, but she was pretty much unwanted, there was a period where she was molested by one of her male relatives, and when her father was under the influence of drugs and alcohol she was abused, so her childhood was an unhappy one. It got to a point where Belva was ready to commit suicide. She didn't do that but she did decide to escape somehow.

By high school they were living in Berkeley and she attended Berkeley High. They were integrated but Belva experience many instances of discrimination, at places of business refusing to serve her and many other things.  She got married at 18  and had two kids. Belva worked throughout her marriage and eventual divorce. Eventually she started to write and became a reporter. She had many jobs around the Bay Area and ended up with a career at NPR.

It was interesting to read about the experience of growing up as a black woman, especially as she was experiencing the changes that happened in the '60's and '70's. When I try to figure out why I didn't particularly love the book, I think it's because I didn't feel like I got to know her well enough. When I read of all that she went through, it is a marvel that she turned out so strong and successful, but I feel like I didn't really learn how that happened.

So, a pretty good book.

Island Under the Sea by Isabel Allende

I read a different book by Isabel Allende previously and didn't like it particularly. I can't remember the title but the thing I didn't like was the spiritualism, or mysticism, or whatever you want to call it, that was in it. There were things about ghosts and spiritual worlds that I didn't enjoy having as part of the story.

This book, however, I liked a lot better. It is well written and has some very interesting characters. It's told in first person by "Tete," who starts out as a slave in Haiti, called Santa Domingue at the time. You learn a lot about the history of Haiti, which was interesting since it's been in the news lately with the flooding and all. Tete and her family and friends leave Haiti for Louisiana later in the book, when the revolution is going on in Haiti.

It's good writing and I was interested to read what was going to happen next. I didn't find it super compelling -- I read a different book in between starting and finishing this one -- but I did want to finish it.

The Risk Pool by Richard Russo

This book is cracking me up. I'm less than halfway through but it's made me laugh out loud several times already. Here's the scene I just read:

The narrator is a boy. He's in a restaurant with his father and a man walks in with his daughter, "the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, and she looked about my age." His father talks to the girl for a while and then says,

"I tell you what, how about I introduce you to somebody your own age. He's not as good-looking as his father, but you can't have everything."


Suddenly, everyone was looking at me, as luck would have it, just as a song ended on the jukebox. Tria Ward gave me a weak smile, as if to acknowledge my reality, or perhaps the fact that I wasn't too bad-looking, or that, yes, it was true, I wasn't as as good-looking as my father.


And in response to her beautiful smile, I bleated.


I remember the horror of it even now. The sound I made resembled no word. It didn't even sound human. My father blinked, probably in disbelief, and for long terrible seconds nobody said anything. I flushed so deeply that my skin burned.

That struck me so funny I laughed until I cried and actually had to run to the bathroom to prevent peeing my pants.

The book is separated into four sections named after something the boy's grandpa used to say about Mohawk, the town the book is set in (as are many - maybe all? - of Richard Russo's books):

"There are four season in Mohawk," he always remarked, "Fourth of July, Mohawk Fair, Eat the Bird, and Winter." No way around it, Mohawk winters did cling to our town tenaciously. Deep into spring, when tulips were blooming elsewhere, brown crusted snowbanks still rose high from the terraces along our streets, and although yellow water ran along the curbs, forming tunnels beneath the snow, the banks themselves shrank reluctantly, and it had been known to snow cruelly in May. It was late June before the ground was firm enough for baseball, and by Labor Day the sun had already lost its conviction when the Mohawk Fair opened.

Apologies to my Michigan friends and family, but I thought this was a great description of the weather in Michigan.

I like all of Richard Russo's books that I've read. This one is my favorite, at least so far.

So Brave, Young and Handsome by Leif Enger

After reading Wolf Hall, like a chain smoker I put that book down and immediately picked up So Brave, Young and Handsome, which I'd bought earlier because I'd like Peace Like a River, by the same author. I loved it. Loved it, loved it.

It's very different from Wolf Hall, no historical fiction to it, no list of many characters or family trees, just a great story. In one of her movies, Katherine Hepburn says, "My, she was yar." That's how I felt after reading this book.

The main character is a writer, Monte Becket. He was a postman who wrote a book that became a bestseller so he quite his day job and thought he'd devote himself to writing. His first book was about a pony express rider and Monte Becket loves cowboys. At the beginning of the book he's realizing that he's not going to be able to write another book. He has a wife Susannah and a son Redstart. He can't bear to confess to Susannah that he's unable to write.

He becomes friends with a kind of mysterious man named Glendon Hale who builds beautiful rowboats. Glendon and Monte end up going on an adventure together, meeting up with other great characters including a boy who wants to become a cowboy and an ex-Pinkerton Detective.

I love the story and I love the writing. Here are a few quotes:

"I'm afraid Franco is taciturn." "Well, disappointment comes to us all.")

"You authors, I mean--this world ain't no romance, in case you didn't notice." "So I am discovering," I replied...but now I am taking it back. I take issue with Royal, much as I came to like him; violent and doomed as this world might be, a romance it certainly is.

"...You were never in jail, I suppose." "Not yet." "Well, it ain't any good. You don't ever wake up and say to yourself, What a pretty day, I feel good today. No," he reflected, "a jail ain't nothing but a collection of corners."

"Of course it's been years, but I doubt forgiveness is the sort of fruit he cultivates."

At this we heard a sharp metallic lurch and Hood roared a string of impolite adjectives. He might even have cried a little. It wasn't his fault. I've looked under a car or two myself, since then--it's bedlam down there, no beginning no end, and a consequence for everything you touch.

That's just from flipping through the first several chapters. I thought the book was enchanting.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

The librarian at Sinaloa recommended Wolf Hall to me, and then so did several other people. It's about Thomas Cromwell, a novel but historical fiction.

When I first opened the book I was worried I might not be able to keep track of things. It starts with a list of characters and also some family trees. This is during Henry VII's time. I decided to read slowly and not skim things, which I often do otherwise, and so far so good (I'm a little over halfway through the book). The only thing that makes it a little difficult is that the author often doesn't use Cromwell's name as she's describing his actions, just "he" and since the sentence before often is about a different male person, I sometime realizes after several sentences that this must be Cromwell and not the other person. It's rather annoying. Why would she do that?

But, besides that minor complaint, I'm very much enjoying the book. The writing is good, and you really feel like you're in England in the 1500's. It's incredible what life was like then. It's horrible the way they burned people at the stake and tortured them in the Tower. She writes about Tyndale and Luther, not as main characters, but several people are killed or tortured because they have Tyndale's book in their possession. Sir Thomas More is rather obsessed with finding those people, it seems. How we take things for granted -- these people were killed for believing that we should be allowed to read the Bible in our own native language.

The peoples' belief in what the Roman Catholic church proclaims is also remarkable. It's a novel so you don't know how exactly right this is, but she writes about King Henry being very worried about whether he'll go to hell if he divorces his wife Katherine and marries Anne Boleyn, although that is most definitely what he plans to do. He, and those who are helping him, do all kinds of things to try to get the church to declare Henry was never married to Katherine in the first place. So far the book's been during that time -- when Henry's trying to get Anne Boleyn. Since I'm over halfway through, I wonder if it'll end when he finally does. The author is working on a sequel.

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later addition
My sister wrote the following about this book. Thought it would be good input to include. She knows her stuff:

I liked Wolf Hall but I was disappointed at the portrayal of Thomas More. He may not have been as wonderful as he was portrayed in "A Man for All Seasons" (or maybe he was), but Hilary Mantel goes to the opposite extreme to make it seem like he really didn't have a redeeming feature--even his martyrdom was just showing off for his European fans. It seemed spiteful. I looked her up on Wikipedia and it seems she grew up in Catholic schools; maybe she's one who has turned against her upbringing.
 
From what I've read elsewhere, I could buy her portrayals of Anne Bolyn and Henry VIII.
 
I'm not sure I believe in her Jane Seymour, however. From what I've read, Jane Seymour did her best to turn Henry back toward Catholicism. She also did her best to bring his daughter Mary back into his favor, while trying to undo Anne Bolyn's legacy. On the other hand, her brother who was regent for her son, Edward VI, promoted more Protestant reforms than Henry VIII had ever implemented.
 
It was interesting to learn anything at all about Thomas Cromwell, the central character of the book. I'd read his name in reading biographies of other figures of the time, but never knew much about him. I was always curious if he was an ancestor of Oliver Cromwell. I looked that up too, and it seems Oliver Cromwell is a descendant of Thomas Cromwell's sister.
 
One thing I was dubious about as a part of Thomas Cromwell's life was the description of really brutal abuse by his father. It seems unlikely to me that someone whose dad beat him up regularly and neglected his education as described in this novel would grow up into the cultured, multi-lingual, Latin-speaking, and humane person Mantel shows Cromwell to be as an adult.
 
Just a few thoughts. And, below, a poem by Thomas Wyatt, reputed to be about Anne Bolyn.

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, alas, I may no more;
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that furthest come behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow; I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain,
There is written her fair neck round about,
"Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame." 

A Room With a View by E.M. Forster

 How much do I love this book and movie? Oh my goodness, so much!


If I remember rightly, I think I saw the movie before reading the book and I fell in love with the movie. I don't know what year it was that I went to the movie. I think I went with Randy and my sister Jan. I remember we arrived late and had to sit so far in front we had to lay our heads on the seat backs to watch. When the chapter headings came up between scenes, I sometimes didn't have time to read what they said because I had to move my head from side to side to side to read all the words.


But what a great movie it was. First, it's British and I do love British movies. The stars are wonderful, too. Helena Bonham Carter is beautiful -- all that thick, long hair -- and so good as Lucy. I love her expressions and mannerisms. Her pettish look when Charlotte bothers her, her giggle when she sees Mr. Beebe by the pond, her disgust when her mother says she's just like Charlotte -- "to a T." The other actors, too. There's one scene that I just wait for, and all it is is a look. Lucy's mother and brother are sitting at the piano and both look out the window on Lucy and Cecil with such a look of *sigh*.


Another scene I love is when they're all in the carriages "and Italians drive them." The Reverend Mr. Eager kicks the driver's girlfriend off and Mr. Emerson says, "Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?" Classic.


I could go on and on. Much of the dialog in the movie comes straight out of the book. I love the book, too, and have read it several times, but in my mind's eye I see and hear the actors, scenery and rooms of the movie, and I feel my reading is all the better for it.

My Life With the Saints by James Martin

Doesn't it just figure that when I finally sit down to blog about some reading again, I can't find the first book I want to write about? I found it in Google Books, though. The main thing I am left with after reading this book is the feeling that my life is meaningful and worthwhile just by living a life of faith and prayer.

The other night at a meeting Brad said he finds that when he reads books by some great theologians their message is: Read Scripture. Pray. Be in community.

There you go. In My Life With the Saints, James Martin writes about one saint per chapter. He writes them in the order that he "met" them in his life. In each chapter he tells about how the saint came to his attention and attracted him, then he writes the story of the saint, then he reflects on the saints' life and what he can see as he relates his life to that, and finally summarizes how and when he prays to that saint.

In the first chapter he writes about why he decided to write the book. He says he started researching and learning about the saints and "Gradually, I found myself growing fonder of these saints and developing a tenderness towards them. I began to see them as models of holiness relevant to contemporary believers, and to understand the remarkable ways that God works in the lives of individuals. Each saint was holy in his or her unique way, revealing how God celebrates individuality. As C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity, 'How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.'" He quotes someone who says the saints are like "older brothers and sisters to whom one can look for advice and counsel." He says "Some might argue...that all you need is Jesus....But God in his wisdom has also given us these companions of Jesus to accompany us along the way, so why not accept the gift of their friendship and encouragement? ....Everything the saints say and do is centered on Christ and points us in his direction."

Over and over as I read about the saints, people so very much dedicated to living a life in Christ, I saw that in many cases it was not because of some spectacular contribution to mankind that they were saints. In fact, some of the saints lived secluded lives and performed menial tasks in a religious community. But, they read Scripture, prayed and were in community.

I'm sure I'll find the book again, and I am confident I'll re-read it.

Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez

Richard Rodriguez was a speaker at the Festival as well. He's an interesting man. He is an essayist. I was going to write, he's got lots of opinions. But that's kind of a dumb thing to say.

Anyway, this is a memoir. He and his family were immigrants from Mexico, and he grew up in the Sacramento area. He talks quite a bit about the experience of learning English after only speaking and knowing Spanish in his home. He writes about the intimacy of the language they use at home vs. the public language of English in school. The experience was very significant, maybe even traumatic for him. He talks about the guilt of hearing his parents' halting English, about losing his ability to speak easily in Spanish although he continued to understand it fine. He also talks about being a "scholarship boy," someone who doesn't fit in with the people around him.

Although the process of getting his education in a different language than he'd learned as a child was traumatic, Rodriguez is definitely not a proponent of bilingual education. He sees it as part of a "decade when middle-class ethnics began to resist the process of assimilation -- the American melting pot." This reminded me of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She talks about assimilating, too, and the need for Americans (and other countries) to have some beliefs and standards that people must agree to when they live in the country. It makes a lot of sense and I can see where speaking the language would need to be a part of that. I'm not so positive, though, that having some bilingual education would necessarily prevent the learning of English. I'd hope that it would be a gentler way to learn English. But it's true that the pendulum often swings too far.

I like the book. I haven't finished it yet but I plan to.

Peace Shall Destroy Many be Rudy Wiebe

I got this at the Festival of Faith & Writing. I've started it but I'm not very motivated to keep going. I'll try to get back to it.

It feels a little slow moving and heavy. It reminds me of some pioneer books I've read before. Not just the story of a pioneer but the thoughts and struggles.

It's about Mennonites.

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later addition

Kind of funny. I didn't finish this book and I also didn't finish this blog. Couldn't get through the book. It just seemed too slow.

The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter

I heard Stephen Carter at the Festival of Faith & Writing, too. He was very interesting and articulate. I read his book The Culture of Disbelief quite a while ago. I know I liked it but I can't remember details, I'll have to find it and re-read it.


The Emperor of Ocean Park is a mystery. His mysteries involve politics somehow, and upper middle class black families. I'm only about 1/4 of the way into the book and I like it so far. The writing is excellent, and it's interesting. A member of my book club said that she likes the book but not the main character. Often if I don't like the main character, I don't like the book. I can see why this main character, Talcott Garland, may not be that likeable. So far he seems a little, I don't know, selfish maybe. But I'm still enjoying the book.


A review from the Washington Post on Amazon.com says (about another of his mysteries):

But let's be honest: No one should read a Carter novel for the mystery.

We know by now that the author is only partly concerned with whodunit; he'd rather ponder why any of us does the things we do -- especially the bad things. For instance, we know it's wrong to cheat, lie, steal or wound, and yet hardly a day passes in which most of us don't commit at least one of these transgressions on some scale. Human weakness is troubling, fascinating stuff, and Carter has spent much of his career plumbing its depths.

So I'll keep that in mind.


Talcott Garland is a law professor. He's married to a lawyer who is trying to become some kind of political judge. They have one child. Talcott's father dies near the beginning of the book and I'm up to the funeral. Talcott's sister has suggested that their father was murdered but Talcott's not convinced yet.

Eat This Book by Eugene Peterson

I saw Eugene Peterson at the Festival of Faith & Writing. What a wise man he seems to be. He wrote The Message Bible which is an amazing thing. I would have thought that was written by a group of people. Imagine sitting down and rewriting the entire Bible!


This book, Eat This Book, is about reading the Bible, "A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading." I have not finished it yet but it's good. It is written in a very conversational style. The title is based on a verse in Revelation where an angel tells John to take a book and eat it; it will make your stomach bitter, but in your mouth it will be sweet as honey."


I've just started the part where Peterson is writing about Lectio Divina. I've participated in some of that in a group but have not tried it myself. I'm eager to read what he says about it. He is trying to be practical and really describe what to do.


In one part he wrote about praying after reading the Bible and asking, "How can I obey?" I'm reading a devotional that has a short passage for each day. Last night's passage was the parable about an enemy planting weeds among the seeds a farmer had planted (not the one where there's different soils). In the parable the farmer sees the weeds and decides not to take them out because he may mistakenly take out the good with the bad. He says he'll separate them at harvest. When I prayed after, it seemed to me the way I could obey was to continue to grow strong in the Lord regardless of the "weeds" around me. A kind of simple answer but not simple to do.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen

I am loving this book. It's cracking me up! I heard about, and saw, this writer at the Festival of Faith & Writing. It's a memoir. She grew up in a Mennonite family, moved on to live outside the Mennonite community, and then went home after her husband left her and she had a bad car accident.

She writes in a very witty way. I wish I could talk and write that way. Here's an excerpt. She is writing about after coming home from the hospital with a catheter, and planning a shopping trip with her friend.

And so it was that I sallied forth into public carrying my pee bag in an aqua patent tote, shopping with urinous enthusiasm...And less than a week later my doctors upgraded me to the kind of pee bag you strap on with Velcro around your leg, under your skit, like a nasty secret. I taught for half the semester like that. And dang, I'm here to tell you that when it's ninety degrees outside, nothing reminds you of your own mortality like a steaming hot bag of urine hugging your thigh.

I'm happy to report that I made a full recovery from the netherworld of tube and clamp...Whereas before I had taken for granted my miraculous ability to run without wetting my leg, I now silently praised my bladder, "Good show! You're holding up great in there honey!" I'd sneeze and think, Bravo! You have achieved true excellence, my friendly little sphincter!

Some parts where she writes about her mother made me laugh out loud until I cried. I'm not finished yet and I'm not looking forward to being finished. Always the sign of a good book.

Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott

Good book. It's a story of a family with a daughter, Rosie, in high school who gets into drugs. The mom and dad have to figure out how to handle it. Rosie excels at academics and is great with kids, but she lies repeatedly about where she is and what she's doing.

The characters are in a previous novel, according to what I've read. She's got a novel called Rosie so I imagine that's the one. I need to go back and re-read it.

I liked this book. It's not funny or sad, it's just a good story, well written. It felt real, the way the parents reacted, what the mother was thinking. The end does not tie everything up but it still felt like a decent ending. You don't know what's going to happen, you hope for the best.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Last night one of my book clubs met to discuss Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. We all liked the book.

It's about twins who were conjoined at the head and separated after birth, born in a hospital in Addis Ababa to an Indian nun. They were brought up by an Indian couple living and working at the hospital.

We wondered about the name. "Cutting for stone" is in the Hippocratic oath so we knew that was part of the reason for it but we weren't sure what the phrase actually means. One member said it meant quarrying, searching for something, which made sense.

Our discussion drifted when we started talking about the way the two boys in the novel would fall asleep with their heads touching, as they'd been in the womb. We started talking about sleeping with our siblings and having our kids join us in bed. My kids all learned to go to Randy's side of the bed because I couldn't take their wiggling around and bumping me.

We all liked the character Ghosh a lot. He was like the boys' father, although not their biological father. He was a rock, everyone could rely on him and he always had sage advice.

I recommend this one, too.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

So, it's been forever since I've written, but I'm going to try again. I won't try to go back and do all the books I've read since my last post, but I'll do a couple anyway.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett is a very good book I read for a couple of my book clubs. It's set in Mississippi (how fun is it to write that, thinking "M-i-crooked letter-crooked letter-i-crooked letter-crooked letter-humpback-humpback-i"?) right at the beginning of the civil rights movement. Three women are the "voices" in the book. One is a young white woman who wants to be a writer and decides to write the stories of the black women in the town. The other two are two of the black women.

I was afraid it'd be more of that Southern women's book kind of stuff but it really wasn't. The women's voices seemed genuine, and it felt like you kind of got in their heads. The women served as maids/housekeepers and also nannys. There was definitely a comment on the way that these women were trusted so implicitly with such an important task as raising the family's children, yet they were not allowed, in some cases, to use the same bathroom facilities. And then those children grew up to have servants of their own.

I recommend it.

Janette Kok: Child of the Seventies

Janette Kok: Child of the Seventies

A Salty Piece of Land by Jimmy Buffet

My book club at work, the Pivot Book Club, decided to read a book by Jimmy Buffet and chose this one. I'd describe it as okay. It was kind of fun as an escapist read; you got that I'm-on-a-tropical-island feeling. But even that meant suspending disbelief in a big way for me -- I hate humid heat and I know how miserable I am in places like Florida, so I kept thinking, "This sounds beautiful but I bet if I were there I'd be all sticky and hot and crabby."

One other member, Sherri, read the book and pretty much felt the same way about it -- okay but not compelling. It was kind of like a series of short stories, which he writes, too. And I felt it had a real man's voice to it. Not that that's bad but to me it felt almost like what you'd hear men talking to men about.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. Although it's not really the same, as I began it I thought this was kind of like when I read Anne of Green Gables for the first time. The story was so good. I was reading every word - no skimming, as I often do when there are descriptions or long passages not central to the plot. After that thought came to me, it occurred to me that might mean something sad was going to happen, as when Matthew died. When I read Green Gables I had no idea it was coming and it was the first book that made me cry.

Something sad does happen, several times. But even though it's not a happy story, it's a good one. It's a nice, thick book and one where I didn't want it to end.

The main character is Edgar, who is growing up on a farm owned by his parents. They raise a particular breed of dog that Edgar's grandfather began, based on breeding for an ideal dog, not a show dog. Edgar is born with no voice. He can hear but can't speak. The doctors don't know why. When I read that in the summaries and reviews I was afraid I wouldn't like the book. It sounded too odd. But I was wrong.

It was a good thing I didn't read what some wrote, that it was part ghost story. That would've turned me off. But when those scenes happened, they didn't seem out of place. In that way it reminded me of Leif Enger's book, Peace Like a River.

And, really, it's not just a story of a boy and his dogs. Not at all. All the characters are so well drawn. And you really are IN the book. You see his life, the characters, the setting.

I guess I can't really write too much about the story or I'll give a lot away. I liked the book very much.

I Feel Bad About my Neck by Nora Ephron

I heard of this book quite a while back and thought it sounded like it'd be fun to read. Nora Ephron wrote quite a few screenplays I like -- You've Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle, My Blue Heaven, When Harry Met Sally, to name a few. I thought of this book again last week when I tried to take a picture of myself.

I'd posted a new profile photo on Facebook and my sister Jan said she'd like to see my new haircut. I thought I'd take a picture on Sunday morning. I sat in the chair and held the camera with my arm extended and took a "selfie", as Cori called it. I couldn't get one that I felt was acceptable! My neck! I've always been self-conscious about my chin anyway, and unfortunately the getting old thing does not help. Cori told me the secret is to take the photo from way up high. Maybe I'll try that. Or Photoshopping may be the answer.

Anyway, I've started reading the book. Each chapter is an essay. The title is from the first essay. Here's a bit I liked, "If I pass a mirror, I avert my eyes. If I must look into it, I begin by squinting, so that if anything really bad is looking back at me, I am already halfway to closing my eyes to ward off the sight."

Actually, I don't avoid mirrors too obsessively. I've grown to accept myself a lot more than I used to. I still hate seeing my big old pot belly but I don't let it get me all crazy.

I'm enjoying the book. It's amusing.

Catcher in the Rye at the Pivot Book Club

Here's what I wrote about our discussion about Catcher in the Rye at the Pivot Book Club:

We had a pretty good discussion about "Catcher in the Rye". Sherri said it wasn't as engaging as she'd thought it would be. It's short and she thought she'd easily finish it quickly and didn't. It didn't keep her going. I had read it before and also didn't finish re-reading it, although I do like the book a lot. Elida did finish the whole thing. We agreed that it is a unique book, and Holden has a very unique "voice". There are funny places and turns of phrases, such as when he said things "killed him" or talked about "old Phoebe" and that kind of thing. Some touching places too, such as the stuff about his brother Allie and sister Phoebe.


After our Jimmy Buffet book we thought we'd read another classic, "Pride & Prejudice" by Jane Austen. So that'll be next our book.


We had a bunch of possibilities of books we were looking at. Some "also rans" were

"I Feel Bad About my Neck" (http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl/9780307264558.html) by Nora Ephron, which is something I want to read because it expresses how I feel -- and also sounds hilarious.

"People are Unappealing" by Sara Barron (http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl/9780307382450.html) was another also-ran that sounded very funny.

"A Reliable Wife" (http://www.readinggroupguides.com/blog/2009/03/librarians-view-robert-goolricks.asp) sounded intriguing.

"Dewey: The Small-town Library Cat who Touched the World" (http://www.deweyreadmorebooks.com/) might be a good, feel-good kind of story.

And "So Brave, Young and Handsome: A Novel" (http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780871139856) was written by Leif Enger and I really liked his first book.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Here's a note about the Pivot Book Club discussion of this book:

"One theme that supposedly was in the book was some similarity to the story of Jacob in the Bible. I know the story but I actually read a few chapters of Jacob's story in the Bible, trying to find the similarities. Of course, the main character's name is Jacob, and there is one place that the discussion questions referenced where Jacob in the book uses a stone for a pillow just as Jacob in the Bible does. But I just didn't see a lot more similarities than that. I'm probably missing something. 

"We talked about the title a bit. The phrase came from a scene in the book where a fellow resident in the home where Jacob lives says he carried "water for elephants" in the circus when he was young. Jacob gets very angry about this and calls the man a liar because elephants drink way too much water for anyone to have carried it. We wondered whether there might be even more meaning to the title than that. Sherri noted that that particular phrase began the whole story of Jacob's life. 

"As we talked about the circus animals, we drifted into some discussion of deciding what we will and won't eat when you know how much animals feel and think, humane treatment of animals, the way we are so distant from the actual source of our food. Robin said she does try to eat organic food and meats where animals have been treated humanely, such as grass fed and cage free. She told us about her husband's upbringing with raising some of their own food. Sherri's grandparents raised some of their food on their farm, too, and Sherri grew up at least having exposure to that, but when you think of our children, they are very distant from the actual animals who provide their food. Elida talked about visiting a relative in Mexico who actually killed a chicken and a turkey right in front of them. It was so intense for her and her brother that they couldn't eat."

All in all I enjoyed the book. At first I didn't like the way it skipped from the present, when Jacob is in a nursing home, to the past, as he remembers his life story. But I got used to it and especially the second time around I found both scenarios to be interesting.