When Women were Birds: 54 Variations on Voice by Terry Tempest Williams

20. A Book with a Number in the Title

 Terry Tempest William's mother died when she was 54. She told Terry that when she died, Terry would get all her journals. Terry's mother kept years and years worth of journals. When Terry opened them up after she had died all she found were blank pages. Book after book, year after year, white page after white page, nothing but blank white pages.

 Terry uses this fact quite brilliantly as a metaphor for her mothers voice and in fact women's voices everywhere. She tells 54 tales of voice, 54 ways to ponder her mother's enigmatic journal. There were tales of being frightened by creepy men in the wilderness and never telling anyone. Tales of testifying before congress. Tales of her mother's journey, of meeting her husband. All ways of looking at our voice both realistically and metaphorically.

 This book had an ethereal zen like quality. You could read it again and again and find new lessons every time. Lots of prompts for writers. Lots of things to ponder for women and members of the human race. I loved it. It makes me want to write another variation on voice.

The Public Library: A photo essay by Robert Dawson

19.  Non-fiction Book.

Imagine a road trip or two where you drive the US in search of libraries old and new to photograph.Mr. Dawson has spent the past 20 years or so romancing the public library.  There is no greater institution in a democracy than a library. The book is filled with photos and wonderment about the bastion of free books, ideas and knowledge.  This is a lovely book to love.  

It is sprinkled with essays by famous writers and not so famous librarians about the role of the library and the experiences of the librarian that are also worth the read.  My favorite was the cogent discussion of the library's role in the social service network.  What is a librarian to do about all those vagrants and crazy people that haunt the library?  

I loaned this to my mother who enjoyed the photos as well. She commented that when we were in elementary school back in the 70s they made a big push to call the library "the media center". At the time I didn't think anything about it, but I realize now that I didn't like that too much.  Of course, much of this book is dedicated to the erosion of public libraries in our current culture: the cuts to finding, the decay of infrastructure, the belief that the internet makes books obsolete.  Perhaps if we did call them media centers people would rush to them. Surprised perhaps that the first media--the original media--had little to do with bytes and charging stations and much to do with print and type bound between two boards.

The best part of this road trip and photo essay book was that it was a father and son road trip.  What a marvelous way to share your love with your child.  If you love libraries, go buy this.  

Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris

18.  A book published this year

This book came onto my radar when the author published a short article about her 30 year career as a copy editor at the New Yorker. The article was so charming that I requested her book from the library before it was even out.  By the time I got to the queue there were already 3 people on it.

This is such a charming book, I don't know where to begin with my praise: her explanation of her job as a copy editor at one of the most prestigious and highly regarded magazines in history replete with anecdotes about authors, and how customs came to be, and how she views various punctuation conundrums; her story about finding her first major error (flour instead of flower) just before the magazine went to press and getting thanks and praise for it and taking herself out for a beer to celebrate; the story of which dictionaries they use and why; or her love of a good pencil, and eraser and pencil sharpener. The epilogue is especially poignant.

This book is a word lover and readers delight.  I smiled throughout, laughed audibly multiple times and read many passages aloud to my husband who is a language and word maven.  Yes, there are times when her discussion of the use of the dash got a little too detailed for me, but those small parts paled in comparison to the whole book which was a fascinating discussion of writing, usage, the great New Yorker magazine and the evolution of language in all its beauty.  

It made me smile thinking of all my editor friends who spend a great deal of time, as Ms Norris does, mulling over the proper placement of dashes and commas and semi-colons.  Auto-correct be damned!

You already know if you are word maven enough to enjoy this book.  Check it out.  (Ann Hicks, if you read this, I think you will love it.)

The Dream Lover by Elizabeth Berg

17. A Book Set in Another Country

In a facebook post, author Elizabeth Berg told a story about her coming novel, a work of historical fiction about 19th century writer George Sand. She said that she had read about George Sand's life, she was fascinated, and implored a writer friend who wrote historical fiction to write a novel based on the life of George Sand. The friend said, "It sounds like your book, you write it." So she did.

So when the book when it came out a few weeks ago, I bought a birthday present for myself. I was interested in the writing process.  How does a writer study history and then fill in the gaps to create a work of fiction?  I felt that this novel would teach me something about writing and about history.

George Sand was a pseudonym for Aurore Dupin a 19th century French writer and bon vivant living and writing in Paris and the French country town of Nohant where her family home was located. Aurore took the name and began dressing in men's clothes when she understood that she could get cheap seats at the theater as a man. She found she liked the freedom men's clothing and masquerading as a man could give her. George Sand kept company with all the famous writers and artists of the day: Chopin, Liszt, Dellacroix, Balzac and Flaubert. She desired to live a life on her own terms and was probably as famous for that as she was for her many many novels, articles and plays.

Berg painted an impressionistic portrait of George Sand from her birth and the origins of her family through to her death. We come to know her complex feelings about her mother, her grandmother, her children and her chosen life as an artist and lover to many of the artists of the day. I was immersed in a French artists life for the week it took me to read it.  I dreamed of Paris and the seine and laughing around a table of french artists.  It made me want to go to Paris.

I was amazed again and again at how progressive and modern this woman seemed. In fact, I kept wondering how Berg might have made the reader more aware of how unusual Sand was for her gender and during the time. She seemed to be perfectly normal in the context of the book, yet she was so different than other women. This perhaps was my main criticism of the book. How can it be made clearer what an unusual person this was? Or perhaps she was not.

This all was such a stunning stunning portrait of a life and a time.  I felt like Ms Berg did a tremendous job at recreating Sands life. I kept reading her prose and wondering how easy or hard it was to turn this real life into the portrait on paper that I experienced. I am looking forward to reading her earlier novels.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

16. A Thriller

This seems to be the it book of the season thus far: featured at B & N and a long wait at the library. A young woman, Rachel, rides the train every day. Rachel observes the same couple in the same house and concocts an idyllic story of their life together as her train rumbles by. Watching them consumes her. It is probably no coincidence that her former house is just 4 houses away, and she also watches it with longing and jealousy. Her former husband and his new wife and baby live there.

Slowly we realize that he left her because she was a sloppy angry drunk. She has lost her job and has no money and lives with a flat mate and gets drunk day after day.  It is through this drunken haze of self pity and loathing that she sees something unusual at the flat she has been watching.  She goes to check it out, and of course she is embroiled in a mystery. The wife is missing. Her ex and his new wife down the block hate her being around and create the perfect love triangle to keep the plot twisting.

It is a fascinating study of memory and loss and point of view.  Ms Hawkins debut novel is not only a compelling read, a thoughtful page turner, but it is a great twist on the genre.  The hero is likable and very fallible and it is great to see a female character in the role of drunken hero.  We hate her; we love her; we root for her.  Put yourself in the library queue, I guarantee your book group is going to read The Girl on the Train.

Mean Little Deaf Queer: A Memoir by Terry Galloway

15. A Memoir

Following the recommendation of a reader on FB--I picked up this memoir at the library. Here is one of the thirst things that caught my eye:

"I feel intensely fond of the whole lot of lousy writing [memoir] that has found its way to print because I smell in those stinkers a fecund democracy. Every sort of half coherent loser is having his say. Maybe even mean little deaf queers like me."

So why do we like memoir so much?  I think that Galloway spells it out quite nicely. It is democratic. We let people any people tell their stories. Perhaps, some of them, might not be well told, but let people tell anyway. It is good for us.

The title pretty much spells out the book for you. She is deaf (from age 9) , gay and has a bit of an attitude. Her chosen profession is acting and she is from Texas. She is happily married to a wonderful woman and coming out was not a huge tragedy, but rather her parents loved and accepted her for who she was.

The memoir itself was well written.  There were many places in the narrative that took my breath away and a few not so much, but I loved understanding what life was like for someone deaf in the 60s and 70s.  The bulky non-working hearing aids and the inability to use a phone.  Also, what it was like for a deaf actor to find work and respect. All of it compelling.

I never really understood what the central tension of the memoir was supposed to be.  What did our hero need to resolve? Was it acceptance of her sexuality?  disability?  Her unusual career?  Ms Galloway came to find a niche for herself in disability theater. Her big aha momnet was not so much accepting that she was disabled but that her disability could lead her to performing with others who were disabled.  That the disabled deserved a place on the stage. The best scene in the book was when she was assigned (without being asked or knowing what she was doing) to a group of disabled people and told to do a performance workshop with them. She founded VSA the Texas Arts and Disability Organization.

Her conclusion is like mine--everyone has a story and everyone deserves the right to tell it and be heard. She concludes by telling some stories of her fellow disabled actors.

The epilogue is where she speaks most profoundly about sound and hearing.  She is given some digital hearing aids which vastly  improve the quality of her hearing. She describes the sudden onslaught of every day noises poetically. It made me yearn for the sound of my lawn mower. She writes "...from the day I realized I was going deaf, sound was my lost love."

And so it is a memoir to the absence of sound, the lost love,  and to all who lost their loves.  This is a worthy memoir.  Maybe not such bad writing but definitely one that belongs in the democracy of the stories.

All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven

14.  A book you choose for the cover

Its just sitting there, propped up on every spare surface in Barnes and Nobles. It is a hardback book--always out of my price range. I notice it.  The next time I pick it up and look at it more closely. The cover is lavendar and one of the characters is named Violet. I could lick it.  I put it down.  It is a Young Adult (YA) book, a genre which until recently I have disregarded, but hey, those kids sometimes are interesting.  I used to be a kid. So why is B & N pushing this book so hard?

The thing I love about young adult books is no matter what the book or the subject matter, they are instantly relatable. High school is high school whether you went through it in the 70's or now. Teens are teens and the adults who try to deal with the teens haven't much changed. Well, there's screens now and texting, but it all pretty much works the same way.

This book is about the worst of the worst teen dramas: bullying, accidental death, and suicide. It is also a love story about two memorable characters Violet and Finch. The bonus in this read (and probably why Barnes and Nobles has this so prominently featured) is it takes place in my lovely state of Indiana. It features real cities and places and teen hang outs and all the kids are going to IU when they graduate. This is a story also about place. At first, I thought the author was making stuff up about Indiana--but they were real places and the author, Jennifer Niven, grew up in Indiana.

I recently learned that in the world of classifying books for publishers and bookstores that the reason a book is slotted into the YA genre is that the protagonist is a young adult him or herself. I wonder if that classification keeps people from crossing over?  Well, I'm glad I took a gamble on the lavender cover with the post-it notes. I enjoyed this book. I cared about the characters and enjoyed a unique window into modern high school life. I also appreciated that the book was not predictable. I kept expecting certain scenes to happen that did not so double bonus.  Young adult or not, I think there is something for everyone in here. I waited for this from the library for a long time so I know there are lots people clamoring to read it.  Perhaps other crossovers like me.