Holiday Gift Guide 2011

What to get for the folks on your holiday list?  Books of course!  I always believe that your favorite book of the year makes a great gift for everyone.  Here are some recommends from my family to yours:

Grayson loved City of Ember. He read it for the second time this year and especially loved the movie it inspired.  This one has a strong female lead, perfect for the YA reader on your list.

Tessa, for some reason, calls all books Ga-Ga books.  She says, "read me this ga ga book or read me ga ga (insert name of book)."  Her favorites have been one based on an Edward Lear poem The Owl and the Pussycat and also a very frothy, syrupy, sweetie book called Pinkalicious.  Both available on-line or at your favorite bookstore.

She likes the part about plenty of money

Tries to eat the cupcakes off the page

My husband Geoff reads only e-books now so I have no idea what he has been reading, but I took some time to ask him what he recommends from this past year.  He suggested Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and the Way we Live.  Geoff says, it puts roads in their proper context and is a harrowing travel memoir.

He also recommends Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, Happier.  This books focuses on the creativity and the people that come together to make a city.  Urban Policy that focuses solely on infrastructure and not the humans that live there wind up as cities with empty buildings.

As for me I have recently dug out a copy of Staying Put: Making Home in a Restless World by Scott Russell Sanders and am writing and thinking about the value of home.  I hope you and yours also are enjoying home and the simple pleasures of the season: music, lights, good food, laughter, and warm company.

I take a few weeks off from my blog at holiday time.  I'll be back in the New Year with plenty of good book recommendations. Happy Holidays to all!

What are your best reads of the past year?  Please recommend them below.

The Girl's Guide to Homelessness by Brianna Karp

Top 10 Things Never to Say to a Homeless Person

10.  You are living in a trailer in a Wal-mart parking lot, how can you call yourself homeless?

9.  How can you be homeless, you have a job?

8.  If you can afford a lap top and a cell phone...

7.  Can't you just crash on someone's couch?

6.  But you are clean and you have a business suit!

5.  How dare you splurge on yourself!

4.  Just call your parents.

3.  Look at the bright side, no bills to worry about.

2.  You shouldn't have a dog.

1.  How can you be homeless, you don't do drugs, do you?


PS Girls Guide is a fresh original memoir which is either about being homeless while in a  relationship gone awry, or the tale of a dysfunctional relationship between a couple who happens to be homeless. I found it to be quite a page turner and I highly recommend it.  I do note--that the story seems sort of young.  My frequent complaint about memoirs of late is they feel like they need to sit in people's minds and hearts for a few more years before they get written.  This whole story happened two years ago. (But I guess when you get a book deal, you get a book deal.)

PPS  I learned that things going viral is not necessarily an accident. Good to know.

PPPS  Wal-mart had one redeeming quality for a few chapters.

The value of paper and a pencil

About twice a month a few friends and I lead a writing circle for women at the Monroe County Jail.  We take lined composition books, pencils, some poetry, and for purposes of a small ritual we do before we start writing, we take a flower. I have been participating in this service to our community for about 5 years now.

Last week, the commander of the jail got angry because he discovered someone snuck in some contraband (rumor has it that it was a lighter), and so he banned everything from coming in--except of course employees and volunteers.  This meant we could hold the writing circle, but we could not bring in the tools that we needed to encourage women to write and tell their stories.  

My co-facilitator brought a sheet of paper with our agenda on it and a poem about hope that we wanted to read to the women.  The guard made us leave that behind.  We went up to the activity room, hands empty.  We did  discover a loop hole in the rule: the commander said that if we already had materials in the jail, we could use those.  When we arrived to conduct the circle, we found we did have some notebooks and at least 15 pencils.  In addition someone gave us a sheaf of lined notebook paper.  We still have kleenex and a little chime to ring and a small smooth stone to pass around the circle.  Our liaison at the jail allowed us to get on her computer in her office so we could find the poem to read aloud to the women. Getting ready for the circle felt a little like a game.

Our circle yesterday was fine and full. We spent 90 minutes writing about hope and that is no small thing for the 13 woman in our group who sometimes feel hopeless.  

As we wrapped up the circle, we asked them all to write for us, so that when we come back in two weeks, they'll have stories and poems to share.  Of course, We realized right away they will have a hard time doing that...they won't have any paper or pencils.  Normally, a writer in our circle would take a full 200 page composition book back to their cell, but if we want to come back again and this restriction has not been lifted, we would need to conserve what paper and pencil we had stored away for as long as we could.

We stared at the dwindling sheaf of paper and made a hasty decision to give each woman 2 or 3 sheets. We made her promise to write. "Use the margins if you have to," we said.   We collected the pencils as they filed out in hope that they could scrounge something to write with on the cell block.  If we let these precious few pencils go, we might not be able to have a writing circle.

Just as they were filing out, I spied a blue pencil box filled with the smallest of pencil stubs.  I opened it up and showed it to the women.  This is what hope looks like.

Hope

It hovers in dark corners
before the lights are turned on,
it shakes sleep from its eyes
and drops from mushroom gills,
it explodes in the starry heads
of dandelions turned sages,
it sticks to the wings of green angels
that sail from the tops of maples.

It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
it lives in each earthworm segment
surviving cruelty,
it is the motion that runs the tail of a dog,
it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
of the child that has just been born.

It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.

It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another;
it is in this poem, trying to speak.

~ Lisel Mueller ~

Situations Matter by Sam Sommers

Sam Sommers, Psychology Professor from Tufts University, has written an interesting book about context that compares to books written by journalist Malcolm Gladwell.  If you liked Blink and The Tipping Point, you would enjoy Sommers' analysis of the importance of paying attention to the situational elements of life which can deeply affect how we understand ourselves, our relationships and our community.

Sommers' readable book combines personal anecdotes from his teaching life and family, stories from popular culture, and current psychological studies to illustrate interesting concepts about day to day problems.  My favorite chapter was called "You're not the person you thought you were" and discusses how our own self-perceptions are shaped daily--perhaps hourly--by the context in which we find ourselves.  He critiques the idea of the authentic self because the self we wish to be within our family might be different that the self we want to be at work and so on.  The self is ever a work in progress, and no self-help book on earth tries to explain that to us.

He does a good chapter on gender which I also enjoyed, but found it overlapped with some reading I had done on current gender trends by Peggy Orenstein in Cinderella ate my Daughter. The chapter on race described a lot of training I had many years ago when I worked as a student affairs administrator.  Those ideas were re-treads for me, but my own unique context might be different from another reader's. I loved the chapter on finding a mate and falling in love.  I also loved the chapter on why often many people witnessing a crime or distressing event fail to act.  We really aren't bad people.  Perhaps lazy, but not malicious.  He ends with several emails and anecdotes from former students who have taken his ideas and theories and used them in the wider world.  All the information felt really useful and practical for understanding common situations.

Much of his storytelling and thinking seemed to me, fresh and original.  I read several chapters of this book aloud to my husband as we drove to various destinations on the Thanksgiving holiday.  The stories and ideas prompted thoughtful conversation with one of the most interesting people I know.  (Wanted you to know my own context for enjoying this book.)  I highly recommend Situations Matter and would love to lend this early review to anyone who is interested.

Roger Ebert: Life Itself

The most useful advice I have ever received as a writer, "One, don't wait for inspiration, just start the damn thing.  Two, once you begin keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it's going?"   These rules saved me half a careers worth of time and gained me a reputation as the fastest writer in town.  I'm not faster.  I spend less time not writing.
--Roger Ebert

I fell in love with Roger Ebert the writer after reading this much talked about article in Esquire Magazine last year.   I had always simply regarded him as that movie critic for the Sun-Times and on that TV show with the skinny guy, but Esquire made me consider him as a fine writer and an interesting man. When I heard of his memoir, released this year, I put myself on the list to check it out from the library.  I had to wait a few months to get it.

Roger Ebert has had a life many of us would envy. One observation he made of his life early in the book is that none of what happened to him, happened by design, or because he had some sort of plan.  All his major life turns were accidental.  In 1967, he was suddenly told by his editor that he was the new film critic, and he began reviewing movies and made a life out of it.  He was suddenly offered the gig reviewing movies for PBS which eventually was put on commercial TV, and thus he became a household name around the country when he sat down every week with Gene Siskel. In the last reinvention of himself, his editors at the Sun-Times requested he blog. He began to write on-line and discovered the wonder of having conversations with his fans and his movie community. It was a whole side to his career he never considered. I loved the idea that his fabulous life was entirely serendipitous. 

Roger Ebert then takes us along on the journey of his life as he meets and greets famous movie makers, actors and other famous writers.  He travels in London, South Africa, Venice and New York.  At times his book is poignant: stories about his childhood dog or his father's death or the sad tale of his love life under the thumb of his judgmental mother.  I was especially interested in his friendship with fellow critic Gene Siskel, I shed a tear over that chapter.  Many chapters are great behind the scenes tales of his life among the stars and directors.  If you want to know about Ingmar Bergman or Martin Scorsese and what they were like as directors and subjects, this is a great read.  Toward the end his chapters are philosophical as he digests the last sad chapters of his life.  He is unable to eat or talk due to his cancer and many surgeries, so his abilities to read and write become more and more important to him.  He thinks of his own death and makes sense of God and religion.  I loved the whole memoir, and think it can serve as a great primer on how to write a memoir--focusing not so much on the linear passage of time, but more on the themes of our lives as we look back on a life well spent.

The book was at its best when Ebert looked deep into this past in the early chapters as a boy in Urbana, Illinois. I did not care as much for the gossipy chapters on movie stars, and I hope to God I can write as beautifully and cogently about my life when and if illness begins to run its course as Roger Ebert can.  If you are a movie fan or a fan of the memoir, this is a great choice.  I give it a thumbs up!

Books and 9/11

Shortly after 9/11, I began to wonder when the books about the disaster and the mentions of the day would begin to appear on bookshelves and in the movies.  Ten years outside of the horrific time, I think we can safely assume there is now a 9/11 canon.

Like many, I am interested in reading about the time, wishing to get inside the minds of people who witnessed and experienced the horror first hand.  When I read memoirs that take place over the span of time covering September 11, 2001, I eagerly read about what the author was doing.  One amazing thing about that day is that virtually everyone can tie themselves to other people via those moments and days.  We all know what we were doing simultaneously.

I heard Lauren Manning interviewed on NPR on September 11, 2011. Unmeasured Strength is her personal account of the horrible flames that engulfed her body in the lobby of the world trade center on the morning of 9/11, and the great strength and determination it took her to recover after the fire burned over 80 percent of her body.

Ms Manning had an insurmountable climb to make her way back to family and normalcy. Her face, back, legs, fingers and arms had to be grafted with new skin and devices and contraptions had to be constructed to keep her skin pliable so she would be able to move normally.  She had surgery after surgery on her hands and arms.  She had months and months of rehab and physical and occupational therapy.

When I think of this story, I think of her complete positive attitude.  She had to focus on living and recovery and the hard work of healing all while ignoring the stares and disabilities in order to be able to climb out of the very deep dark place that she found herself after the attacks.  Chapter after chapter focused on her unquenchable drive to heal and resume her life before the accident.

This is a fast read, easily available at the library, and if you are interested in the stories of the victims of 9/11, a satisfying read.

A book and a movie

Several years ago I read a fabulous travel memoir by Tim Moore, humorist and traveler. He wrote Travels with My Donkey, an account of his trek with a donkey named Shinto along the pilgrimage path from St. Jean Pied de Port in France through the Spanish Pyrenees to Santiago do Compostela near the coast of Spain.  I loved the tale and I became fascinated by the idea of pilgrimage. What do modern day pilgrims seek? Why do they walk 500 miles just to reach a church that is purported to hold the remains of one of Jesus's apostles?  It has been awhile since I read this, so the details are cloudy but I know he met fellow travelers, ruminated about the history of the pilgrimage and wrote about Spain and being companionable with a donkey for a few months.  I always wondered if it was something I could do.

Last week, I had the opportunity to see a fabulous new movie, The Way, that just came out which follows a man as he journeys on the camino to Santiago.  A fictitious story about Tom Avery (played by Martin Sheen) who travels to St Jean Pied de Port to retrieve his only child's body after he is killed on the trail in a freak accident.  Avery is filled with grief. He has an empty, lonely life and was far from understanding his now deceased son (played by Martin Sheen's real life son Emilio Estevez, who also made the movie).

In a bold move, Avery decides to pick up his son's backpack and gear and take the trek himself, in an attempt to honor his son and try to understand what he was trying to do with his life.  He takes along his son's remains and begins to scatter them along the path.  Of course Tom is sad, angry and alone, but he begins to meet other travelers, all who have their own path and their own reasons for trekking the camino.

Some might call it predictable and the movie might be a little long, but it was beautiful and gave me a chance to see what the pilgrimage might really look like. I did love watching crusty Tom Avery begin to melt away, dig through his layers of grief, and connect with his travel companions.  I love how travel thrusts unlike people together. You never choose your travel companions; they choose you. All the shots are filmed in Spain along the trail with a musical score that made me want to sing: a gorgeous and thought provoking film.

I began to wonder, would I ever have the opportunity to walk this trail?  I told my theater companion that when we retired we were going to take this walk together.  Perhaps get our kids to come and carry our packs?  Will you join me?