Bettyville by George Hodgeman

22. A book based on or turned into a TV show


From the dedication page:  "Finally it is for Madison and Paris, where so many I have cared about walked. I will always remember you, good people."

Epigraph from the book: If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. You can take it down like a can from a shelf. ~Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights.


Love for this story and this book and this writer took me by surprise. I spent the first 75 or 100 pages trying to decide what the writer was trying to do and when I finally got it, I was in love.

George Hodgman has written a beautiful memoir about growing up in Paris, Missouri and taking care of his aging mother Betty in the present day. It is an elegy to small town rural life that is disappearing under a haze of poverty and meth clinics; it is a love letter to his mother; it is a painful understanding of what it means to be young and gay and come out to your parents. It is the bittersweet time of life when you are saying farewell to the people who knew you best and are taking stock of what they have given you and what you in turn have made of it.

Page by page Mr Hodgeman won me over with beautiful writing, love for his home and his people, and a slow building of suspense for how everything would turn out with his mother and his life.  Let me add also that the author is hysterically funny. He has a dry with that allows him to slip in great lines and passages again and again.

This is an amazing book made great because Mr Hodgman is a really truly fine writer.  Betty and George could be any one of us.  Betty and George didn't fly to the moon or get elected president. What they did was not extraordinary, but the author's writing is simply superb. So many lines to write down, so many places to stop and hold your breath because he knows exactly how to express love and family and emotion and life.  I truly can't say enough great about this memoir.

This is a book I will gift to many people as we all come to understand what it means to grow old and say good-bye to our past and make sense of how we became who we became.

( I read somewhere that this books has been optioned for a TV series--not sure if i will come about but I think that qualifies it for the above category!)

The Light Between the Oceans by ML Stedman

21.  A Book That Became a Movie

My summer beach read is set in 1920's Australia--on an island called Janus where the lighthouse keeper and his wife live in isolation from the rest of the world.  Tom is a decorated war hero and Isabel is his young bride.  Both are excited about the prospect of having children but when Izzy has miscarriage after miscarriage she begins to go a little mad.  A storm one day brings in a small rowboat with a dead man holding a little crying baby.  Izzy and Tom see it as a gift from God and they raise the baby as their own. Until one day they just cannot escape the truth any longer. They must confess and deliver the child to her true mother.

This is a page turner and a tear jerker all in one book.  I sobbed pretty well through the last few chapters. It was a beautiful story, a tad overwrought in places, and I think the author wrote it to be turned into a movie because there were definitely some cinematic scenes--many of them--and the location of the novel-a distant lighthouse in the sea are also very cinematic. There are also a lot of twists and turns--I really did not guess how it would end.  So its really a fine read.

As a writer, I noticed how deftly she wove points of view back and forth between multiple characters. I loved that about the book.  I personally always have a hard time reading about sad things happening to good people--but hey--thats the point of a good story.

So this is worth picking up.  Good beach read.

(After writing this review, I went back to note that someone has made this into a movie set to be released this year.  When I started the review I had not done that homework.  Cant wait to see the movie now.)

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.