The Good Nurse by Charles Graeber

I picked up this page turner on my birthday, while I was away from home at a conference, my traveling companion was busy doing other things, and my family was far away.  I needed something to draw me in and help me forget that I was missing birthday among friends.  I am not sure where I first heard about this, but the minute I saw it on the shelf I knew it would be my birthday present to myself.  I love reading journalistic accounts of real life events.  I am interested and amazed to watch a writer recreate complex events and turn them into elegant narrative despite the fact the he or she was no where near the events of the story. This write especially was able to see and hear and interpret all that happens with his clever imagination and in the eye of his mind. The transformation and writing can be miraculous.

This story of an angel of death, a nurse who begins killing his patients, is a  difficult story to tell for a host of reasons.  Charles Graeber recreates the events of 16 years by reviewing police reports, hospital reports and interviewing the many many people why were involved, even the killer himself. The story is told in an exciting manner, first by following the nurse who is perpetuating the crime, and then by following the police who eventually clue in to his crimes. The difficult mitigating factor is the fact that the hospital was fighting the police who were investigating the crime. Hospital officials would never be complicit in investigating the system that allowed a nurse to kill multiple patients over and over. How bad would that look for the hospital?

The Good Nurse is a true life crime thriller complete with good guys, bad guys, and real heroes. It is scaring me away from hospitals for the foreseeable future.  Who know how easy it would be to get away with murder? I highly recommend this true crime/hospital drama.  

I want to lick this book I loved it so much

After Visiting Friends: A Son's Story by Michael Hainey, I found by accident when a friend posted a short article on fb about it. I requested my library purchase it. (I love doing that!)

Michael Hainey's father died when he was 6 and afterward he felt he could not talk about it.  His mother and family, in their grief, had a kind of conspiracy of silence about that night and about the man. So for years he lived with this wonder of who his father was and how he died that night in 1972.  When Michael finally begins to seek out answers, he delves deep into the Chicago newspaper world of the 1960's and 1970's: a fascinating time and a fascinating place.

His work takes him to hospitals and morgues and all over the city. It takes him back to his father's hometown in Nebraska and to a small town in Ohio.  It takes him to San Francisco and he even meets a few people in Kentucky, New York and Wisconsin.  He meets long forgotten family members and newspaper colleagues of his fathers. He meets the sadness of a life cut way too short.

It is beautiful writing and an amazing tribute to a time, a place, a family, and a person or rather several people. I loved everything about this book: the writer's pacing and sensibility. His honesty and his self-revelation. I loved how much he loved his mother and family and how much getting to know his father after all these years meant to him. All the passages about his childhood and adulthood and his unraveling the past felt poignant and purposeful.  He wove all the stories of his life and his parents' lives together quite skillfully. I read it in two days.  His last line in the book was the ultimate:  "I went searching for my father and I found my mother."

I am pretty sure I heard him interviewed on Fresh Air about this book as well, and here is the original article from the Chicago Reader that got me started.  I highly recommend this memoir.

100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do by Kim Stafford

A few weeks ago I expressed my love and appreciation for this book on the elegant art of listening.  I was so impressed by the author's love of words and writing that I thought I would check out his new memoir  100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared.  It was not readily available at the bookstore, so I asked my public library if they would order it, and it showed up in about two weeks.  (Love the public library!)

This is such a fine and exceptional book that I can't stop thinking about it.  Stafford makes everything seem effortless yet profound. His writing is smooth and creamy and makes me want to eat it at every meal.  He is writing about his beloved brother who committed suicide 20 years earlier.  Mr Stafford remembers his brother in a series of stories from their youth together, their short adulthood together and the aftermath of living with such a tragic end to someone you loved.

Every week I sit in the company of great writers who pour their hearts out in short poems, and memoirs of their lives.  Word upon word, each writer is building a series of stories and vignettes not unlike these.  I loved this work.  All the stories individually and as a collective quilt of stories, were without question true and beautiful: honesty that cut to the bone of life.  My fellow writers and I can and do easily write this beautifully and could piece our pieces together to form a grand story, but something about the way he did it seemed profound and unreachable.  He has left something tugging at my heart. Writing that is worth emulating in its candor and vulnerability.

God Bless my library for buying this for me, but  I will have to buy my own copy.  There are many writing lessons to be learned here.

For my reader that lives in Portland. This man runs the Northwest Writing Institute.  You should check it out and take a class from him.  Better yet, I'll come visit and we can both take a course from him.

Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman

A fascinating memoir about life in an Hasidic Jewish sect from Brooklyn, New York.  Deborah Feldman is born to an Hasidic couple who for a variety of reasons do not raise their daughter.  Instead, she is raised by her ultra conservative grandparents, and at age 17 is married to a man she has met only briefly.  Deborah tells about the orthodox rituals and rites that she must obey to be a good daughter and wife.  Throughout her life Deborah feels like she does not quite fit in and shortly after the girth of her son manages to start college and eventually gain the skills, means and courage to divorce her husband and leave the sect with her child.

For such a young writer, she astutely wrote and depicted her humiliating oppression as a girl and young woman. I raced to read to find out how she would escape her circumstances.  In the meantime, I noted lots of intriguing details like how she had to sneak books to read because they were forbidden and how sad she was when her husband forced her to throw all her books away, claiming they were the cause of their unconsummated marriage.  I will remember her description of the ritual baths women are supposed to take to purify themselves every month.  Her rendering of events was clear and unsentimental, but vivid.  All she needed to do was describe what was happening-no editorial necessary. 

The drawback to this fine fine piece was that after such a great build up to leaving her home and family, she leaves many many posed and provocative questions unanswered.  She says that she would never be allowed to leave her son, yet she is able to leave with her son.  She writes briefly of a mother that abandons her and in the prologue we know she has re-established contact with her, but we never see how her mother figures into her liberation.  We never know how her husband and family reacts when she leaves.  She escapes to a new apartment--with a bed, but we don't know how she got that.  One assumes that writing of these customs and rituals has left her permanently shunned, yet she does not mention the aftermath at all. (On her blog she writes of death threats from her grandparents.)

At the end she does spend a great deal of time discussing how much she values her freedom and how much she loves making her own decisions.  I assume that the above questions may be answered in her next book, which is due out in 2013.

Still, it is a lovely story, full of surprises and honesty and insight.  I loved it all and await the next chapter. It works well like the Jeannette Walls memoir Glass Castles.  Get it from the library or your local bookstore. There may be a wait at the library.

What books would you buy?

When I was a child my parents would remind us, "Don't forget to talk to strangers." How could we be helped if we got lost, or were hurt? And how else could we be citizens of the world? Our millions of intricate moves may be as direct and simple as making songs and learning from strangers.  ~ Kim Stafford

A good friend tuned me in to a slim book book by poet Kim Stafford.  The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft spoke to me on many levels.  There were a million passages to quote and use and copy in my work with women and storytelling.  It is a useful book that promotes at its core--listening for words and stories and life.  There were many chapters and ideas that took my writer's breath away. I feel certain I will return to it.

The punchline is that it is a library book, and I cannot write in (or for that matter keep) a library book.  Do you? Written in 2003, it is largely unavailable except on Amazon. I am certain to place an order for this book so that I can remind myself how to be a good listener of the muse that brings us story.

The various essays include writing exercises, stories about the writer's life (including a magical moment where Dick Cheney is the poet's muse), advice about how to listen and find story in everything, and a chapter on where to write.  (We devote a lot of conversation about ideal locations and conditions for writing in my writer's group.) He addresses fiction, non fiction and everything in between.  It felt like the most random, yet eloquent and useful how to write book that I have ever come across.

You'll need to order this one on Amazon as well unless you are lucky enough to have it at your local library.

If you want to begin your writing practice in this new year--I recommend starting here.

Le Road Trip

One of my favorite books  of the past few years was a little talked about memoir/sketchbook about a traveling woman who decided to stay put: When Wanderers Cease to Roam.  Her book and drawings and musings about life off the road were so captivating and so thought provoking that it sent me on several writing journeys of my own.  I give it as a gift quite frequently, and I use it for prompts for the many writing circles I run.

When Vivian Swift published this second book modeled much after the first, I knew without looking that I wanted a copy.  She recounts her roadtrip to France that she takes with her new husband.  What they see, where they go and those little travel adventures you have when visiting a foreign country.

Le Road Trip: A Traveler's Journal of Love and France is much like Wanderers in that it is a beautiful book with quirky observations, lovely sketches of all the author does and sees, a breakdown of the phases of a trip from beginning to the inevitable bad travel days to the parting.  This journal is full of reminiscences of past trips, quotes, and the little details that many over look: a mermaid door, the color of the sunset, a cat at a rooming house,  a particular cheese and wine at a cafe.

Ms Swift is taking a post wedding trip with her new husband, a man who is clearly her kindred spirit, so this book in a way is something of a love story--or perhaps a love tribute.   Because of the eclectic, poetic nature of the book, I am a little unclear as to how long the trip was and some of the day to day itinerary was a tad jumbled.  But it really did not matter.  The whole journal was a tribute to adventurers and travelers every where.  It made me a lot nostalgic for the road and anxious to try my hand at my high school french in Paris.  Everything is better with croissant.

Fun fact: did you know that France is the number one tourist destination by far?

This is another lovely book worth owning. Buy it if you can.

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

One hot afternoon during the era in which you've gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up in heroin, you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She'll offer you one of the balloons, but you won't take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You're wrong.  You do.  --Cheryl Strayed

I have always been an avid reader of advice columns.  I came of age reading Dear Abby and Ann Landers, loved the dry wit of Miss Manners, found special wisdom in consumer help columns and most recently, fell in love with the modern practical humor and wisdom of Dear Prudence.

I read them religiously, pose my own questions (in my head) frequently, and curiously wait to see what their responses will be. What will mine be?  What set of moral values do they set their standards by and do they follow them?  Advice columns are an endless source of story and inspiration.

As you may recall, a few months back, I read a great travel memoir by a new writer named Cheryl Strayed.  Her voice was clear and compelling as she told her story of backpacking on the Pacific Coast Trail, and I looked forward to her next writing.  I stumbled upon it this week in the bookstore and bought it without question.  (This is how much I like her writing.  I knew I would want to own it and keep it.)

Cheryl Strayed writes an on-line advice column under the name Dear Sugar.  Dear Sugar writes clear compelling advice to her readers (in response to letters of course) but also writes her own memoirs and tiny stories as a way of illustrating life lessons.  Nothing here is boring.  All her responses feel spot on and you sense her empathy and conviction through the power of her words.  I loved every letter and every response.  She eclipses any other advice columnist in beauty and compelling argument.  I am going to buy these by the bundle and give them as gifts for all occasions.  Marriage, baby, job crisis, death in the family, middle age crazies...it is all right here. Look no further. These are real letters from real writers and her responses are her own: a collection of columns that is both help, self help and memoir.  Look no further for a great summer read.

This is the best book I have read this summer, and I put Ms. Strayed on my list of writers to see if I am ever able. She is so honest and forthright about her own failings and grief that you cannot help but love her.  The epigraph at the top of the page--written in second person--is her own story.

 You can borrow this from me but if you wait long enough, I might buy it for you.

Poetic Cookbook or Poetry about Food

Tamar Adler has written this wonderfully poetic book about cooking and food. There are a few recipes but more importantly she philosophizes on how to cook with what you have in the kitchen, how to make something grand out of simple ingredients, and really, how to live.

She uses and advocates for copious amounts of olive oil and salt, has finally helped me to understand how and why to use all that extra parsley, and she teaches how to cook things ahead of time so that you can enjoy roasted vegetables and egg all week without having to fuss every night.  I understand the importance of tasting all the time so that you can begin to understand how cooking works.  She includes no times for how long food cooks because every cook and every kitchen and every time is different.

She makes cooking and kitchen work and feeding friends and family seem like an act of the divine.  I am having momentary images of clearing out my refrigerator of all processed foods and filling it with see through containers of salsa verde and roasted eggplant and chopped cilantro, and I think I have to get rid of the microwave to make room for the 55 gallon drum of olive oil I will need to buy.

I don't mean to make fun at all; An Everlasting Meal is a lovely book and I want to own it and refer to it often (this one is a library book) so I can create food easily and effortlessly and also, understand how to use all the parts of food--stems and peels and bones. Alas, cleaning out my refrigerator and spending all day Sunday roasting vegetables might have to wait for another lifetime.  It sounds like a grand adventure from the comfort of my living room chair.

Better yet, perhaps Tamar would be my friend and invite me to her table once in awhile.  Thanks to her for this lovely book on food and cooking.

Imagine

Suddenly this summer, this book appeared on all the bookstore shelves. It seemed to be everywhere I rested my gaze. I resisted it for awhile then, of course, placed it on my library list.  Imagine: How Creativity Works reminded me a lot of the works of Malcolm Gladwell.  Jonah Lehrer takes an idea, in this case, how the creative mind works, and delves into the exploration of that idea through a wide variety of stories and anecdotes.  He backs up his stories with current brain science and social science that helps us to understand why humans can create and how they create.

The book is divided into two parts.  Part I is the story of how individuals create: the origin of those eureka moments, why we need to become more like children in order to be more creative, the necessity of getting away from a problem to solve it.  Part II is how teams become creative.  Lehrer delves into the fascinating story of Pixar Studios, the importance of a seasoned team (with a few newcomers) in creating top entertainment, and why cities make us more creative.

I read it quickly, talked about it at the dinner table and will use a few of its lessons and quotes in my writing workshops.  I highly recommend this great 2012 read.  Library or bookstore, I think you can find it everywhere.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail by Cheryl Strayed

I chose this book to bring with me on my Scotland adventure this week.  There was something about reading a woman's travel adventure while I had my own adventure that was comforting and exciting.  My adventure involved hot baths and a good nights sleep and thankfully, no rattlesnakes.

I first read Strayed in her essay about grief that got published in an anthology of the best non-fiction.  Her essay was a memoir of her grieving over her mother's death by shooting up heroin and sleeping with as many men as she could.  Both activities led to her divorce from a man she loved very much.  In the essay,  she alludes
to deciding to hike the Pacific Coast Trail as an antidote to her grief. She saves money, plans, buys equipment, and heads out for a 100 day journey through California and Oregon--through the high sierras-- where she quickly learns that though she planned and packed she probably should have trained as well.

Strayed voice is honest and humbled. She goes from novice to seasoned hiker. She grieves, she parties, she experiences solitude and companionship on the trail, kindnesses, and the aforementioned rattlesnakes.  Never in my wildest dreams, even when I was young and fit, could I have ever dreamed of this sort of solo adventure.  I probably enjoyed it so much knowing that she did something that I could never hope to do.

I loved this book and read it quickly on the plane and within 4 days of starting the trip.  I found Strayed's voice to be truly compelling.  I cared about her and wanted to see her complete her magnificent journey.

As a side note, I took this in e-book format and felt sort of guilty and slovenly.  I would love to hand it to a fellow traveler to read or at least leave it in a B & B. But alas cannot.  Also, I discovered halfway through the trip that a fellow traveler is reading the exact same book.   I never would have known had she not mentioned it.  I guess I am realizing that books are a shared experience for me, and that e-readers, don't allow for the sharing of story or the discovering of other people's story journeys.

But you should discover this journey and an important new voice in literature.

Like Family by Paula Mclain

After reading and enjoying Paula Mclain's NYT best-seller The Paris Wife, I noted that she had published a memoir several year ago.  Like Family is Mclain's account of 14 years as a ward of the State of California. Paula and her sisters moved from house to house while in foster care after their parents abandoned them.

I found this all well written and devastatingly sad.  How can a mother just abandon her children, walk away and not look back? Paula and her sisters don't discuss this much, as they are so young when it all happens, but the writer reminds us that this very fact is at the center of her whole upbringing.  This memoir calls to mind basic questions about what is home and why we call somewhere in particular home.  The writing reminds me of Jeannette Walls classic memoir The Glass Castle.  One keeps turning pages hoping that these kids turn out okay...wondering if these kids will turn out okay.  They do, and the journey to find home and family is worth the read.

If you like memoir, this is one of the  best.  I am guessing that with The Paris Wife doing so well, people will want to reach back and give this true story another look.  Available at the Public Library.

Better Late than Never

Has this happened to you?  You see a book that looks interesting at the bookstore, read the covers, and put it down because you think, not quite what I am looking for.  You see that book many times over the years, right at the top of the pile: you note positive reviews, it's place on the best seller lists and its general omnipresence everywhere, but still you decide not to pick it up.  You finally buy a copy at a used book sale for 50 cents, thinking, maybe someday I will read it, and after it gathers dust for a few more years, you recognize the author is coming to your town to speak and think, maybe now is the time.  Once finished, you crack yourself on the head and think, why did I wait so long, that was amazing!!!

I just finished James McBride's memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to his White Mother.  It is the perfect example of why memoir can be better and more interesting than fiction.  A white Jewish woman marries a black man and moves to Harlem where she has 8 kids and then when that man dies, marries a second black man and has 4 more kids.   Her son James, always full of questions about his mother and her past which she refused to answer, tells the tale of his own upbringing and his feelings of love and shame for his unusual mother, a white woman in an African-American world.  He tells his mother's story of growing up in an Orthodox Jewish household in the south, her leaving her home for New York, and her conversion to Christianity which went hand in hand with her marriage to a black minister.  This was more than 25 years before Loving v Virginia made anti-micegenation laws illegal.

McBride told his own story of being number 8 in the 12 child family and intersperses his story and memories with his mother's story and memories: both well written and compelling.  It seems that it does not matter what is the color of your skin, all you really need is love as Ruth McBride Jordan demonstrated over and over again.

My edition of the book was the 10th anniversary edition, which I recommend:  an epilogue to the epilogue. All 12 of Mrs. McBride's children went to college and most to grad school. She raised 12 successful children on the motto all you need to education and God. Money doesn't mean anything.

 Now that I have read this beautiful memoir, I am ready to meet James McBride.  If you live here in town I hope you will join me.  Perhaps it is true that when we are ready to read a book it appears before us.

Harry Potter Mania!!

It is only right that today, on the opening day of the last film of the Harry Potter series that I dedicate my post to the boy who lived.

My son and I have been counting down the days until this last movie.  We watch the trailers over and over again.  We try to get ahold of sneak peaks and watch those, and we have re-watched many of the first 7 films.  Of course we are also attempting to re-read the Deathly Hallows, and are not going to finish by opening night.

It took me a long time to get to reading the series.  I dismissed it as kids stuff and decided to wait to read it until my kid asked me to.  He never did ask me.  I ended up reading them in reverse order and then reading the final one:  1, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 7.  Then I begged him to let me read them to him.

Once I read them they stuck with me like no other.  I re read the final battle scenes several times, tears streaming down my cheeks. Like many writers, I wish I could have thought of this. Not necessarily for the eternal fame and glory, but because it was so fun and interesting and made perfect perfect sense.  All the pieces fell into place.  I loved the words and terms and ideas she created:  quidditch and muggles and squibs and Hogwarts. All named perfectly and creating this amazing world of whimsy and magic.  I have wished so much I could go there and visit.  This is the work of the writer.  To create a world that others want to visit, characters we want to meet, or in this case things we want to do, like ride a broomstick or cast a spell to protect us from evil or how about that amazing handbag of Hermione's?

So I bought my tickets a week ago, hired a babysitter for the little one, and have already made a plan to be there for this first night of the last show.  We will watch in 3-D, but I would enjoy it either way. It is not the effects for me, it is the hero's story that captivates me, I could hear it told over and over again.

The wee ones casting spells on each other

I told my son yesterday that after this comes out on DVD, and we watch it at home once or twice we need to put all of them on ice for a few years.  Once the little one has reached a certain age, I need to read them to her and start introducing them to her.  It would be nice to have them be brand new and magic to both of us.

Now there is nothing left to do but enjoy the show!

Wingardium Leviosa

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

Spied an end of the year review of this on NPR, waited for it at the library, got tired of waiting and picked it up at B & N, read it in two days.  This totally absorbing tale of an internationnal newspaper based out of Rome is a love letter to newspapers and the people that work at them.  It is a sad tale of one person's love and how he manifested his love in a business...the newspaper business.  The owner's love unfolds as you learn more about the history of the paper and we   understand the complete story gradually by looking at it from the point of view of a dozen different employees that are related to the paper in some way.  We hear the tales of the copy editors, the news editors, the stringers and the publisher.  Each man or woman is flawed and made whole by their work at the newspaper or in the journalism business.   Each character adds to the tale of the newspaper.

Each of the stories stands alone and the reader sees the threads of the paper and the other characters appear and disappear in each chapter.  No character gets more than one chapter: you won't get terribly attached to one story even though they all feel compelling and meaningful.  Almost all the characters are well drawn and sympathetic: the copy editor who loves his life and job, the Egypt stringer who has no idea how to be a journalist,  the reader who keeps up with the news as best she can, the owner who doesn't really care about the paper and so on. All these points of view draw you into the real story about the rise and fall of a small  newspaper: who started it and what's to become of it in the era of all things on-line and all the struggles in between.  

This is the kind of book that turns a traditional narrative on its head, but works oh so very well.  I have been thinking a lot lately about different ways of presenting a narrative: how to organize story by thoughts or by point of view or by alternate chronology.  This novel was so interesting and so thrilling because it was told in a completely different and very interesting manner.  The telling of these tales collectively left some mysteries that the reader solves but the characters never do.  The whole thing felt sweet and sad and achingly true. 

The Imperfectionists is a stunning and accessible story, and I hope everyone takes an evening or two to read it.  You will be enchanted.

Bill Bryson Love!

I had heard great things about Bill Bryson but he seemed like one of those writers that looked good but was always second or third on my list.  I heard him interviewed on NPR a few months ago about his latest book At Home: A Short History of Private Life, and I decided it was time to tune in to Bill.

Bill Bryson is probably most well known for his travel memoirs like In a Sunburned Country and A Walk in the Woods which I have meant to read but never had the time.  Over my winter holiday I made time for this most recent book and enjoyed all of it.  He contends that we write history books over  monumental wars, elections and discoveries but really everything settles to what happens in the home.  He answers the questions behind the big question: how did our modern homes become the way they are?  Why do we sleep on beds?  Why do we put salt and pepper on our tables?  What are buildings made of and why?  What is the history of bathing?  He explores critters that live in homes, the history of childhood, gardening, servants and historic preservation.  It all comes together beautifully and is really very interesting and oh so readable. I am sorry I put him off  for so long.

I have put two more of his books on my list and would be interested to know if you have any favorite Bill Bryson books? Which one should I read next?

Breaking Night by Liz Murray

Breaking Night: 

Urban slang for staying up 

through the night until the sun rises.

Breaking Night by Liz Murray is rightly being compared to Jeannette Walls gripping account of her rise out of poverty in The Glass Castle.  Both memoirs feature a harrowing tale of a childhood in hell, and how each woman manages to pull herself up out of despair and create a life for themselves.

Even though these tales are similar, Breaking Night does feel new and fresh and original as Liz Murray does a great job of telling her own very authentic tale.

Recently, I read a memoir writing book that cautioned the writer never to  paint oneself as a victim. It is more important to tell your story with regard to your own truth, but never let it devolve into self-pity. Liz Murray has painted herself as an authentic believable human who has overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles  in rising from living on the streets and rejecting all formal schooling, to finishing school and being accepted at Harvard.  One of the most touching scenes I have ever read comes after a newspaper story of her is printed, men and women from all over the country come to her and offer to help.  A wall she had built for herself between us and them came toppling down.  She could not believe the generosity of people who she had never even met.

Equally as touching are the scenes she paints with her mother.  Even though her mother was an addict and refused to care for her children in any of the ways that we have come to regard as normal parenting, Liz loves her mother.  Liz's mom, in her own screwed up way, loves her right back. I loved that I always understood that.  As a reader, I never hated her parents, even though plenty of people probably should.  

Just as The Glass Castle kept me turning pages so did Breaking Night.  Don't be fooled into thinking this is the same story though. It is very different and very much worth the read.  Liz Murray has gone on to become a motivational speaker and owns a company which encourages people to be all they can be.  An important message for any of us.

Bermuda Shorts by James J Patterson

When Bermuda Shorts arrived in my box from the ER program, I had to study it a minute.  I thought this was a new book by the famous author who is known for thrillers and detective novels. The one who has all those books on the best seller list.  Why does he need an early review? I wondered.

I realized after glancing at the back that this was a different James and a different kind of book: a collection of thoughtful, humorous, bittersweet essays about love, growing up, sports, politics and telephones.  There was also a short story thrown in at the end as a kind of bonus.

The personal essay is not an easy form to master, but it is also the most compelling reading, and I found myself thinking of people who would like to read certain essays.  My father-in-law would love his essay on the Washington Redskins (in fact there was a whole series of sports essays that for some would be quite compelling.)  The ministers at my church would have loved an essay titled God, Gordo and Gandhi.  Anyone who has been in love would like The Conjecture Chamber.  There is something here for everyone.  

I hope more than a few people notice this small book.  I enjoyed every essay and found them all to be clear and intelligent and worthwhile.  He manages to tell stories and be thoughtful.  He draws almost always from his rich and interesting life as a sports fan and a musician and son.  James J Patterson is a good writer and you will spend an enjoyable afternoon with this collection.

If you saw my last post you know I also love the publishing house that put out this collection.  I am more than willing to lend this to anyone local, but would also like to encourage you to buy it or to request it from your local library.  Support small presses!

Fiction February Part III-The History of Love

As I finished this book, I realized Part III of my fiction series would be aptly ready for posting on February 14th. It is a work of fiction that you will want to read slowly because the words are like perfect poems. They will beg you to savor them. I couldn't put the book down, but I had to. Each portion of the story makes you gasp a little, and you realize that reading a book like this fast is like chug-a-lugging fine wine. This book is a perfect reflection on the age old tradition of love. It is a story about a story and how it found its way from a corner of Nazi occupied Poland to present day New York.

The characters we meet are sweet and memorable. The writer of the story, Leo Gurskey is an old man with nothing except secrets and memories. The girl seeking him, except she doesn't know she is seeking him, is Alma, the name doppelganger of Leo's long ago lost love. The final meeting of the two main characters at the end made me choke a tear or two. An unsuspecting love story of sorts that crosses the ages.

This is the kind of book that warrants re-reading in places because the names and connections can get tangled and confusing. There are also a few love stories and threads that remain unresolved which broke my heart, but ultimately, this book is about fine and perfect writing. This is the novel we all wish we could write. Nicole Krauss inhabits the psyche of her main characters perfectly. You know and love them all within an instant.

Honor your valentine by giving them a copy of The History of Love or better yet, read it aloud to them. It will take your breath away.

Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert

We heard Elizabeth Gilbert speak at the IU Auditorium last fall. The audience was filled with middle aged white women like me who had fallen in love with her and her writing after reading her travel memoir Eat, Pray, Love.

She did not disappoint. She has a wonderful self-effacing wit and warm demeanor. She spoke eloquently about her writing and her romance. I leaned to my friend sitting next to me and said, "I feel like she is speaking directly to me." My friend replied, "No, she is speaking to me."

Of course, someone in the audience asked her what she was working on. How does someone top an international bestseller like One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia? She told us she was writing a book about marriage and commitment as she had recently become married to her true love after vowing never to be married again.

Eighteen months later, I walked into Borders and there she was piled high and wide in a bright orange cover: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage.

I had heard Gilbert interviewed on NPR a few days before, and her sensibility as a writer sounded clear and charming. She confessed in the interview to having been completely finished with her book and ready to mail it off to her publisher when she got cold feet, realized it was not what she wanted to say, put the draft in a drawer and started over again. Doesn't this seem astounding?

I found Committed to be part memoir (a continuation of her love story with Felipe), part marriage manifesto, part feminist pronouncement and part self-help marriage manual. I loved every part of it. Gilbert's writing is clear and funny and convincing. It was what drew so many people to Eat, Pray, Love.

This really is a book for women, and it is a book about marriage through the ages and what marriage can mean for women. One part that took my breath away was her recounting of her Grandmother Maud's story. Equally as impressive was her own mother's story, and I got a little teary eyed at the end when she finally reunions with her lover after some weeks apart. As someone who endeavors to write myself, I feel like Gilbert makes the act of writing seem so easy and so profound.

Make no mistake, this is a very different story than the book that brought her so much attention, but the writing and the ideas and even the story are as captivating and worth your time as ever. I give this many stars.

The Black Notebooks by Toi Derricotte

Since the election of Barack Obama there has been a lot of discussion about whether or not we live in a post-racial America. Does race still matter? I have spent a lot of my professional career thinking about questions of race and diversity. Race does divide us and even the election of an African American president cannot erase years of prejudice and hatred. Sometimes, being a well-meaning white woman, I don't know what to say or do. Ignore someone who is different, ask about difference and acknowledge it, pretend like there is no difference. There are no easy answers and this memoir by poet Toi Derricotte does not give me an easy way out.

I loved this book because it explains a point of view about race and race relations that I can never understand because I have not lived it. It acknowledges racism and the burdens of hundreds of years of collective mistreatment of African Americans through the eyes of a black woman who looks white. Her discussion of race and it's implication in her life are very very compelling. She considers the subtlest of racist comments and how they make her feel to the barring of herself and her professional husband from a country club because of their race or even the utter isolation she feels at an artists' colony when she realizes she is the only black face among a sea of well meaning artists. She does not want to be branded as "being too sensitive" but it is hard not to see and hear and take in all of the racial divides at every turn.

What I understand best about race and about being black is that you cannot escape it. One is black 100% of the time, and I have the white privilege of living in a society where my race is not considered all the time. I had heard that before in diversity seminars which I have attended, but never really understood it until I read and thought about Ms Derricotte's story.

In some ways her story seemed hopeless. As if we will never escape these feelings for each other. We will never be able to join hands and take part in the famous dream, but I also believe that in reading stories like this and in striving to understand each other we take tiny steps toward healing and ending racial divides. The writing and the insights in this book are beautifully rendered and emotionally compelling. Ms Derricotte is a fabulous and insightful storyteller. I think white folks need to read this book.