Looking for quiet gifts

It’s been over five weeks since my last bookconscious post. In that time, I only finished reading four books, although I’ve got three others started and have dipped into several volumes of poetry. Two of the books I’m currently reading are all about grounding oneself in the quiet within an ordinary day.  I can’t seem to focus on that goal, despite a deep longing for it.

My writing life is in complete disarray. Yesterday I went out in the car to run an errand or convey various members of my household to various places 8 or 9 times (I lost track). While making a cake for my father-in-law’s 68th birthday, I had to start over after adding the wrong ingredients. In short, I’m in need of a rest or a re-balancing of some sort, although I don’t see one on near horizon.

One of the books I’ll be reading for months to come is Paul Wilson’s Finding the Quiet. This book caught my eye at Gibson’s, and after checking it out at the library, I decided it was one I should own. I have to be more careful about my book purchases, because I now have three piles of books beside my nightstand, another pile on the nightstand, and two more piles beside my desk, plus the ongoing “library list” of books I plan to check out.

Many of these are books I purchased at the Five Colleges Book sale last spring or picked up at the store or at the New England Independent Booksellers Association trade show — publishers provide booksellers with advance reader copies so we will get excited about the books. I came home from the NEIBA show very excited — with two huge bags of books! I am looking forward to reading the stacks (and to inviting several of the authors to Gibson’s to do readings) once I get through my current library pile. But I digress.

In Finding the Quiet, Wilson manages to condense much of what I’ve read in other books about meditation into very clear, bullet-pointed directions. Some people who are seriously into a particular school of meditation, or who have studied with a master, might find the book a little too basic or pared down. But I’m to the point where I’ve read a great deal of theory and am not making progress, so I want, and perhaps even need, a step-by-step meditation guide. Finding the Quiet is simple in the way an uncluttered but well designed floral arrangement is simple — there is plenty to study, plenty of detail to notice, but the basic lines are clean and clear.

Wilson actually advises readers to stop about 100 pages into the book and try the first practice he suggests for a couple of weeks. I’m at that point, and have already slipped in and out of regular practice, forgotten or misremembered half of the pointers, and even have fallen into the cold weather trap of convincing myself that I can meditate on my back underneath the down comforter if I try hard enough (it doesn’t work, I fall back to sleep). I’m determined to start fresh and stick with it, and stop my mind from racing the moment my eyes open.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of welcoming an author who writes eloquently about the importance of those first quiet early morning moments. Katrina Kenison’s Mitten Strings for God is one of those touchstones of my early mothering years. A  friend recommended it when my children were small and I was feeling very outside the mainstream in the suburbs of Seattle.

Many people I knew had their young children in foreign language, chess, swimming, computer, gymnastics, dance, music, and any number of other lessons. The neighbor children were so busy at ages 2 &4 that they had to schedule play dates with my kids instead of just coming over. My kids and I liked to play baseball in the back yard, sit in the tree fort the Computer Scientist built for them in the secret space between two enormous cedars, go to what they called the “Poohsticks” park (where there was a bridge perfect for dropping sticks into the stream and then hurrying to see them come out on the other side), or stay in bed on a rainy morning with a bag stuffed full of library books, reading and snuggling. If it was sunny, we often decided at breakfast to pack a picnic and head to the zoo.

I felt torn in those days, worried that I was denying my kids all the “enrichment” the culture around me was pushing for younger and younger kids, and yet knowing in my heart I didn’t care to give up our spontaneous, joyful time together. Mitten Strings for God made me feel like I had a wise friend reassuring me that snuggling, baking together, and pretending to pitch a wiffle ball to the entire Mariners lineup (whose many pre-batting rituals my son could mimic precisely) was good for them, and for me as a mother, and I should listen to my heart.

I was very excited when I found out that Kenison’s new book, The Gift of An Ordinary Day, is about the changes she faced and worked through as her sons became teenagers. I’m a little over halfway through, but it’s proving to be, once again, the wisdom I need for this point in my mothering journey.She writes about the ways that motherhood has helped her truly grow up — something I’ve told my own kids for years. I didn’t ever truly consider what I value, what is real and true and good in the world, and what I was just doing on autopilot because it’s what I’d been conditioned to do, until I had children, and faced the prospect of discussing life with them.

Now as I read Kenison’s new book, I have a child who is contemplating a different path than his mainstream peers — a year or more off before college to pursue a dream, and perhaps skipping the SAT’s, which so many people accept as an inevitable rite of passage.  I’m about to get into the section of the book where Kenison describes her own son’s decision not to take the SAT’s, and writes about the enormous pressures of the college application process, and how challenging it is for parents to resist worry and involvement. I can’t wait to find an afternoon to sit down and finish the book.

One reason I didn’t read as many books in September is that I was slogging my way through Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I wanted to finish, because I was leading the Gibson’s Book Club brown bag discussion. After nearly setting it down for good, I managed to get through it. Although I like magical realism, and I love a meaty, challenging book, this one wasn’t my cup of tea. I found many of the devices that make it a unique piece of literature distracting.

I wanted to know much more about the Midnight Children, especially Parvati and Shiva, and how their magical powers manifested themselves.  Certain long sections of the novel, such as the description of Saleem’s time in the jungle,  lost me. And I didn’t like keeping track of so many possible sub-plots which were just story-alleys that didn’t really lead anywhere. Much of the difficulty I had is due to the fact that I have limited time to read and trying to pick up where I left off in such a complex novel was unsettling. I loved Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and I want to try Rushdie again when I have the time to devote to understanding his work better.

By the time I finished Midnight’s Children, it was nearly time to start the next Gibson’s Book Club book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbary. Certain sections of this deceptively quick read are as challenging to penetrate as Rushdie’s most erudite prose. Barbary is a philosophy professor, and in our book club discussion I saw more clearly that she managed to express her views on aesthetics and the meaning of ethical living through the two main characters, Renee and Paloma, and to a lesser extent, through Mr. Ozu.

The group also discussed one of the things I didn’t care for when I first thought about the book — it’s scant plot — as a characteristic of the novel of manners, or in this case, a novel of philosophy and manners. When I considered it in that light, I liked it better. I’m still not crazy about the ending, but again, the book club helped me see that there wasn’t a great alternative.  We all agreed that the characters are well drawn, and that The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a tremendously witty novel. We concluded that this book would make a great film.

Speaking of film, I took time out last week, even though I really didn’t feel like I had time to spare, to go to Red River Theatres to see Bright Star. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it brought Keats and Fanny Brawne alive so vividly that I am feeling compelled to add Andrew Motion’s biography of Keats to my “to-read” list.

Back to my current book pile: I’m in the midst of a Nicholson Baker read-a-palooza. I’ve got three of his earlier novels out on inter-library loan, and I’m currently reading The Everlasting Story of Nory. It’s wild — like being nine all over again, or being inside a nine year old’s stream of consciousness.  Baker must be a wonderful father, or else he vividly remembers the emotional complexity and creative chaos of his own childhood mind, because he doesn’t miss a thing in the inner life of his child protagonist.  I’ve also got Room Temperature and The Mezzanine checked out.

A few weeks ago, Nicholson Baker was in Concord to appear on my favorite radio program, NHPR’s “Word of Mouth.” We invited him to come to the store to sign books — we weren’t able to book him for a regular evening event, but the publisher was willing to send him over for an informal signing. Baker is an Important Writer, a serious literary star, and he turns out to also be very gracious and kind, clearly one of the book tribe (some authors, believe it or not, seem to belong to the marketing tribe, or even worse, the all-about-me tribe, instead), who was eager to see what poetry books we had on hand and seemed genuinely happy to be visiting the store.

I read his new book, The Anthologist and got a foreshadowing of what a down-to-earth, generous soul Baker is when I read his positive description of a small turnout for his protagonist’s poetry reading in an independent bookstore. Having recently dealt with an author nowhere near as talented who was insulted that very few people showed up for his reading, I’ve decided Nicholson Baker is “good people,” as my boss would say. Kindness aside, he’s also a genius.

In some ways, The Anthologist is like The Elegance of the Hedgehog, in that both Baker and Barbary are projecting a philosophy of aesthetics through their protagonists. In Baker’s case, it’s a defense of formal poetry, which his main character, Paul Chowder, is trying to get down on paper for the introduction to an anthology. Chowder is such a richly wrought character — you feel like you know him well by the end of this short book. The Anthologist is cerebral — there are plenty of musings on poetics, literary history, and human nature — but it is also funny, warm, and compassionate. There was something about it that made me feel as if I’d had a long satisfying discussion with an old friend when I got to the last page.

Part of my delight in The Anthologist was due to the fact that I wasn’t actually expecting to enjoy it so much. I was a little fearful, in the wake of Midnight’s Children, that I wasn’t up to the task of reading another Important Writer. Baker, after all, is known for the mind-blowing ly new kind of novel he created with his debut, The Mezzanine. After enjoying The Anthologist so thoroughly, I had the confidence to read another book I wasn’t expecting to relate to easily, John Manderino’s The Man Who Once Played Catch With Nellie Fox.

This time, my reticence was simple to source: this novel screamed “guy book.” I enjoy baseball (although not so much this October, with the Red Sox out of the playoffs), and the book received nice reviews when it came out in hardcover, but I wasn’t sure it would be a story I could get into. I was wrong.

Manderino, like Baker, creates a main character you want to root for.  Hank is struggling in his personal life,  and he’s at the end of a long and not terribly successful baseball career, playing for a  less than minor league team. Manderino leads readers through the final games of the season, and Hank’s ups and downs as he tries to make things right with his fiancee and her son, and sets out to better himself at the public library. What’s not to love about an author who sends his hero to the library? As he tells the story, Manderino weaves in multiple points of view. Even the librarian gets her say towards the end of the novel, and although she’s a minor character, I thought that was a lovely touch.

But it was also fitting. Despite the rough ballplayers and their seriously flawed social lives, this isn’t a jock book. The baseball action is interesting, but the meat of the novel is Hank’s crisis: is he washed up? Has he failed his fiancee? Can he reach her angry boy? Can he ever be the man he wants to be, the man who was once an innocent boy, full of dreams and potential, playing catch with Nellie Fox? Does his memory of that day, which he calls The Story, have any basis in reality, or has he relived it into something it wasn’t?

John Manderino is coming to Gibson’s on November 12, and I look forward to meeting him. The Man Who Once Played Catch With Nellie Fox is a dense little book, busting at the seams with longing, and with the difficult work of living out the ordinary in light of bigger dreams. Hank and his friends seem to me to represent the simple victory of choosing to be true to oneself and to the people in one’s life, even as life offers the temptations of self indulgence, self pity, or despair. Manderino’s characters are vivid and the story moves along. It’s an entertaining read.

Which is how the Computer Scientist described The 13th Hour by Richard Doetsch: an entertaining read. I brought it back from NEIBA, and knew it was the kind of book he’d enjoy. He said the concept — a man traveling back in time at set increments of time to try and save his wife from being murdered — was intriguing, and it’s a good thriller. It was fun to get him in on the advance reading. I’ll be able to hand sell this book now that I know something about it.

The Teenager joined us in reading some intriguing Norse literature last month.  Together, we chose some sagas to read as he was waiting for his Oxford University distance education course on viking archaeology to begin. I decided, when he first mentioned that he wanted to explore Norse works for our literary circle, to contact his Oxford tutor, David Beard, as well as a Harvard professor, Stephen Mitchell, whose website I found as I searched for Norse resources.

Both professors very generously shared their recommended reading lists for great Norse literature, and both also suggested the best translations. We ended up hunting down used copies of The Vinland Sagas, in the translation by Magnusson and Palsson, as well as Njals Saga. Bookconscious fans know the Teenager got very into T.S. Eliot last spring, so he also requested we get the Poetic Edda.  At Mr. Beard’s suggestion, I ordered Norse Myths by Raymond Page on inter-library loan. We each began exploring the Raymond Page book but have not yet discussed it. After a brief hiatus while grandparents visit, we’ll get into the Poetic Edda.

In September, the Computer Scientist, the Teenager, and I read and discussed The Vinland Sagas. We enjoyed those very much, and the Teenager said he found it interesting to compare the two (Saga of Erik the Red and Saga of the Greenlanders). He’s attracted to Norse literature in part because he is a Tolkien fan, and he found some sections of the sagas felt very familiar to him as grand, heroic adventure tales. He also noted that despite the age of these texts, they are enjoyable reads — debunking the idea that teenagers don’t respond to classics.

One other thing he noted was that the Vikings had no better relations with the Native Americans than later explorers did. Kids have a natural sense of justice, and mine have always been disgusted at the way native people around the world have been exploited or exterminated in the name of progress.  They didn’t need any “politically correct” text to figure this out. Eddie Izzard helped, however. I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve discussed a historical event (or a more recent one, like international squabbling over rights to polar waters), and one of the kids has said, “No flag, no country.” The Preteen hasn’t seen Izzard’s dvd’s in their entirety, but she knows the gist of this piece.

The Preteen read a heap of books in September. She’s a big re-reader, and she often revisits entire series, especially Harry Potter, but also Tintin, Time Warp Trio, and some of the Royal Diaries series this month. Another of the Preteen’s favorite re-reads in September, and she said yesterday perhaps her favorite book, period, was The Amaranth Enchantment, by Julie Berry.

A friend recommended she read the first four Sisters 8 books, which are another set of stories about orphan siblings, (why are there so many orphans in literature, anyway?) each of whom discovers she possesses a special “power and a gift.” My favorite thing about this series is that the authors’ eight year old daughter is credited as their co-author. The Preteen enjoys the artwork as well as the stories, and I hope to host this talented family at Gibson’s when the fifth book comes out next spring.

The Preteen also read The Demi-God Files, by Rick Riordan, which is a supplementary volume to the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. We just gave her the boxed set for her birthday, and she is psyched to finally get to read The Last Olympian, which she has had on request at two different libraries since late August. Popular books. Now she’s got her own set, plus a nifty map, all in a treasure chest. And the Teenager gave her a copy of The Demo-God Files, to complete the collection.

She also got an American Girl book called Earth Smart Crafts, and the two books about 2009’s “Girl of the Year,” Chrissa. Until recently, I would have told you she didn’t need to read about bullying. Some recent stories from friends about rampant meanness among middle grade and teen schoolgirls makes me wonder if it’s not a bad idea to know this is out there.  Generally speaking, I’ve found the American Girl books to be mostly practical, fun, and wholesome stuff, if a bit on the fluffy side, and my daughter loves them. I recently told a customer at the store that if you need a book for a young girl facing puberty, you can’t go wrong with The Care and Keeping of You.

I’ve written before about something I really admire in my daughter – the ability to put down a book that’s not interesting to her. This month, for her, that was The Graveyard Book. She did read Coraline, also by Neil Gaiman, and enjoyed that better, but still said it was a tad too creepy for her taste. I just about always force myself to read to the end, even if I’m not enjoying a book. But really, why do that?

We’ve been encouraging her to read history through literature, and in addition to the Royal Diaries, she also read Tomie dePaola’s For the Duration, the latest installment in his autobiographical 26 Fairmount Avenue series for kids. This one covers WWII, and the Preteen thought it was sad, but well done. She can read these books in one sitting at this point, but still finds them interesting.  We’ve often seen or heard something about the 30’s and 40’s or visited someplace and she’ll remember a detail from dePaola’s books. He is such a gifted storyteller, as well as one of my all time favorite illustrators. I’m glad she doesn’t feel she’s outgrown his stories. I haven’t, and I don’t plan to!

In Finding the Quiet, one of the techniques Wilson suggests novice meditators use is called “instant replay posture.” There’s a drawing that shows how to hold one’s hands and use that posture to trigger a psychological response and bring oneself into a peaceful, relaxed state. As I think over this month’s reading, and the calm, all’s-well-in-the-world feeling I get when I’ve read a really satisfying book or enjoyed a good conversation about books with friends or family, I see that the “quiet” is there for me even in the midst of what feels like a life that’s too full right now.

Conjuring peace is simple enough if I let myself feel like I’ve just finished The Anthologist, or a Jane Austen book, or a really good poem. All I need it to notice that gift, as Kenison suggests, that is in the ordinary day-in, day-out family life, even when life’s busier than I’d like. It’s there when I talk with my children and husband, or when we just sit near each other, reading. It’s not exactly the same as when they were small and snuggled close, asking me to read a favorite story again as soon as we got to the last page, but then, I’m not the same as I was then either (thank goodness). Books have been a constant for all of us, and that’s the quiet I’ll focus on.

My gone away world: the annual not-back-to-school post

August was a tough month in the bookconscious household. We went through vicarious ups and downs with the Teenager as he traveled alone to Europe and back (although a German customs agent didn’t think he was old enough to return home alone, but that’s another story), turned 16, went through public high school soccer tryouts, and ended up switching to a smaller private school team.  We got busy with both kids planning our not-back-to-school life — looking into interests, choosing resources, figuring out who needs to be where, when, as their fall activities began.  And I unexpectedly traveled to Chicago for my grandmother’s funeral.

Mary Levin Harris was 96, and until only a couple of months ago was a voracious reader. Recently she could no longer comfortably hold up the phone. But over years and years of conversations, no matter what else we discussed, we always made sure to tell each other about whatever we were reading. I’ll miss that very much.

She was a librarian and an English teacher, including a stint in an experimental school in Chicago with glass-walled classrooms.  When we first decided not to send the kids to school, I was a little nervous about telling her, and at first, she really didn’t understand why we’d do such a thing. I tried explaining, but I was still figuring it out for myself. I recall telling her it was just what seemed like the right thing to me, to free them to learn all the time, anyplace, rather than raise them to think that learning happens in a place called school during school hours on school days.

My grandmother believed in me the way grandparents tend to, unwaveringly, and she spared me the scathing disapproval she was capable of dishing out — disproportionately to male members of the family, but also to public officials when she wanted them to right a wrong, and to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, which she read faithfully, when she felt the paper had unfairly disrespected a sitting president (Clinton). But I knew she didn’t really like the idea of her great-grandchildren being unschooled.

That changed one day in the late 1990’s, when she was in her 80’s. The woman who was cutting her hair told her about her son, who had been put on Ritalin. My grandmother was dismayed, especially when the woman told her it was quite common. When she got home she called to ask me whether I’d heard that “children are being drugged,” and told me in her day, if a student acted up, the teacher and the principal discussed how they were failing the child, and what to do about it. She told me it was probably a good thing I was not subjecting the kids to school if this is what it had come to.

From then on, she was very supportive of our homeschooling, and even told me I was doing a marvelous job. Once she moved to Atlanta and actually got to know the kids — we were fortunate to visit her once a month or so for just over two years — she told them in person how bright and beautiful and wonderful she thought they were, so they got to bask in the steadfast approbation that I enjoyed for so long.

They often talked to her about something they were learning, and were amazed by her sharp memory. Once they told her we’d read the Gettysburg address and she recited it cold (by then she was over 90). Another time they asked her what it was like to live during the Depression., and she said the New Deal helped her go to college. She frequently asked them questions, too — about what things cost, how their digital cameras worked, what they were reading.

So I’ve been feeling a little low, knowing I can’t share what they’re up to with her anymore. She was fascinated with the way they pursued their interests. I know she would chuckle to hear that the Preteen is exploring animal behavior with a kit that teaches one how to train a pet fish. And she’d find it interesting, if a bit hard to imagine, that all of the Teenager’s homework in his college French class has to be done online in a virtual computer lab.

Most of all, she’d love hearing about the books we’d all been reading. So I’ll get on with telling you, dear readers, and hope that Grandmother, or GGM as she signed her letters and cards, is reading over my shoulder, in a way.

While the Teenager was in Germany, his younger sister and I planned for not-back-to-school. She chose a new math resource. After watching her brother work on Algebra II, she decided on the same publisher for her book –  Teaching Textbooks, which are designed for self-directed learners. Both kids seem to be actually enjoying using these, and the Computer Scientist thinks they are great.  The Preteen also chose some science kits, including the aforementioned R2 Fish School, and checked out a stack of books about Vikings at the library.

She’d recently read most of the Percy Jackson books, so she needed a new pile of reading materials, and chose a Royal Diaries book about a Mesoamerican princess in 749, and Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, which won the Newbury Award. She liked Percy Jackson’s adventures and event got out our well-loved copy of D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths to brush up on the gods and goddesses. In fact, we ended up buying D’Aulaire’s Book of Norse Myths, to enjoy along with Viking history.

The Preteen discusses books with her friends more than the Teenager ever has, and in August she read the first of the Sisters Eight books on the recommendation of a good friend. She also came to a middle grade author event at Gibson’s, and came home with three books — The Amaranth Enchantment, Carolina Harmony, and Also Known As Harper.  She enjoyed hearing the authors in person, and I think it’s unlikely she would have picked these books otherwise. So, if you live where you can go hear an author in person, go, and take your kids!

The Teenager’s oldest friend gave him a new soccer book, When Saturday Comes, for his birthday. On the trip he finished Magnificent Sevens, about five great Manchester United players who’ve worn number 7. He’s begun French class at the community college and in October will begin a Viking history class at Oxford University (online). In the meantime, we wrote a syllabus for his science exploration, based loosely on a class we found in MIT’s open courseware site.

We’re calling his studies “Soccer: The Biology, Chemistry, Physiology, Physics, and Psychology of the Beautiful Game.” We found three great books for him to use as he delves into the science behind his beloved game: Science and Soccer; edited by Tom Reilly, Fitness Training in Soccer: A Scientific Approach, by famous Danish coach Jens Bangsbo; and The Physiology of Sport and Exercise, a textbook we thought would provide interesting reference materials.

Some of you may be wondering, “Aren’t you unschoolers? What’s with the math books and the texts?” We’re life learners, and we use whatever works. We’re not anti-textbooks, although the Teenager and I are not enjoying the disconnect between his college French text and the website that has the labs/homework.

Although our motive in encouraging him to take this class was to help him see what college is like, I’m finding myself agreeing with him that the model isn’t all that different than what we’ve tried to avoid by learning on our own: we’re left feeling that the student is supposed to sit back and be told what to learn when. I told him there must be some logic to the homework, but today one of his classmates asked about the apparent lack of context with the text, and the teacher acknowledged it’s a problem but didn’t have a solution!

It’s causing us to waste time trying to figure out what lab goes with which portion of the book, which is unfortunate. Hopefully it will get easier (this is only the second week). Meanwhile, I wish I’d just gotten him the French editions of Harry Potter — the preteen is learning German that way. But I do think there’s nothing like speaking a language with other people, and so far none of our informal plans for that have panned out, so I’ll probably encourage her to take a class, eventually.

At the Preteen’s urging, the Computer Scientist is reading the whole Harry Potter series (in English), and last month I mentioned he was on the third book. He’s not deep into the seventh. He seems to be enjoying them and also has fun chatting with both kids, who love to pop in and ask him, “Where are you? What’s happening?” I think given all the heavy stuff he’s read this year, he’s having a good time with Harry Potter. Although I maintain that H.P. can be an avenue to some thought provoking conversation, and it’s not just fluff.

I read a book set in England last month, though not in the wizarding world. Helen Humphreys‘ The Frozen Thames is a lovely little book, made up of forty brief stories, each one set during one of the times between 1142 and 1895 that the Thames froze over. The concept of the book is an entertaining as Humphrey’s fine writing. The author’s website lists this as a work of creative nonfiction, but it reads like a collection of linked stories.

While Humphrey bends genres, Nick Harkaway bends time, reality, and life as we know it in his amazing debut novel, The Gone-Away World. This is the best book I’ve read all year. Part action novel; part philosophical commentary on economics, warfare, and ethics; part mind-boggling alternative reality, part futuristic thriller — and also very funny, very well written, and so smart it’s kept me busy wondering what in the hell happened at the end for several weeks.

One thing I loved about this book is that while the plot deals with awful things, there was no passage so horrible I wanted to turn away. Harkaway writes searingly without the over-the-top explicitly graphic prose that seems to garner so much critical acclaim these days. As I said, the end was so mind-blowingly hard to grapple with that I continue to think about it. And despite the fact that it’s a long book, I never got bogged down. As far as I’m concerned Harkaway’s a genius and I can’t wait to read whatever he writes next.

Another humorous novel I read this month, Nibble & Kuhn by David Schmahmann, is not nearly as apocalyptic as The Gone Away World, but is also concerned with the impact human enterprise has on the quality of human life.  Schmahmann’s skewering of law firm life is wickedly funny, but his main character, Derek, struck me as a whole person, who doesn’t always act in predictable ways, and who manages to be both irritating and endearing, just like most real people.

It’s easy with satire to lapse into caricatures, but I found myself empathizing with Derek and definitely wanting to know how the hopeless case he is stuck with will turn out. The romance in the novel is unbelievable, but it’s meant to be — Derek is dumbstruck when he finds out who he’s fallen in love with as well.  But it’s not simply a satire with a romance, it’s also a story that examines human resilience and the tension between motives and actions when getting ahead might be at odds with getting things right. Schmahmann will be  reading at Gibson’s; I’m looking forward to meeting him, and to reading his earlier, award winning novel, Empire Settings.

For a bleaker, but very personal look at human nature, our impact on each other, and the survival of the human spirit even when it’s dragged through the deepest pain, you can’t do much better than to read essays by Andre Dubus. His son, Andre Dubus III, is coming to Gibson’s in October, and I happened to see Broken Vessels and Meditations from a Movable Chair at the library, so I checked them out. Last year I spent a lot of time studying personal essays. These are some of the most moving I’ve read.

Dubus lived through several emotional traumas and a very serious accident that put him in a wheelchair. He’s probably better known for his fiction, but I enjoy his nonfiction style, which is very straightforward and unembellished. His range, from the simple beauty of time spent with friends to the agony of losing the use of his legs and the pain of living with his children only part time, is somewhat gut wrenching. You can’t read very many of his essays at a time. But despite all the difficult things Dubus lived through and explores in his writing, he work is never self-pitying.

On the plane to Chicago, I read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Here is another gifted man who dealt with illness, writers’ block, personal strife, the unrest and disillusionment of the early 20th century, but rather than feeling sorry for himself, he shared what he’d learned in the struggle to be an artist. The letters in this book are his responses to a nineteen year old who he knew only through this unsolicited correspondence. Yet they are deep, open, and personal. I have a book of Rilke’s poems in my “to read” pile for this month.

Another book that had been in my “to read” pile since April was The Half-Inch Himalayas, by Agha Shahid Ali. Many of his poems are concerned with ancestry, family history, and place, all subjects I am deeply curious about, and which I spend time thinking about in the context of my own family. “Snowmen,” a poem both surreal and heartfelt, strikes me as a beautiful piece of writing as well as poignant cry of both longing for and struggle with one’s own history.

Both the poetry book and Sacred Time and the Search for Meaning by Gary Eberle were books I discovered at the Five Colleges Book Sale last spring. Eberle explores the history of human time, which is interesting in itself, he also probes the spiritual aspect of our relationship with time, and tells of his own return to living in sacred time, as manifested in the seasons and the church year.

I enjoyed the book, although it made me somewhat frustrated with myself. I’d been doing very well for a long time at keeping a sabbath — a day of little to no work and no computers, but of real recreation and rejuvenation. Lately I’ve been unable to keep that sacred time for myself. As a result of my overly busy life and my lack of respite, I’m not writing much right now.  Eberle’s book was a strong reminder to get myself back in balance.

One aspect of my sabbath is reconnecting with faraway family by phone. Even before my grandmother’s last weeks, our weekly conversations had grown shorter, and sometimes she was not feeling up to talking. I was fortunate to be able to talk to her just about weekly for my entire adult life, as well as during my childhood.

And yet, there was so much more I wanted to ask. I have a box of letters she and her brother wrote to each other, and they left me wondering even more about family stories. By the time I’d puzzled through some of them, she was less interested in speaking of the past — her mind was on the end of her own story, having outlived nearly everyone who was a part of it. At dinner the night before her burial, as my cousins told stories, I realized how differently even the same events seem through the prism of each of our lives, our experiences, our hearts. How different we each were through her eyes than our own vision reveals.

Everything I read this month reminds me in some way of how universally humans seek to understand ourselves, each other, and our lives in relation to each other.  The novel I’m reading now, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, is an epic tale dealing with that same problem — finding out who we are, who we’ve come from, how our story fits into the greater human story. I’m also reading Joseph Cambell’s and Bill Moyer’s conversations about the human search for meaning through story, The Power of Myth. Both are excellent so far.

Seeking meaning — in story, in sacred time, in relationship with people who came before me and those I live with now –  feeds my poetry writing. Grandmother was always thrilled when I had something published, no matter how small or obscure the journal. She also liked to recite poetry, and she read A.A. Milne to me with great relish when I was very young. I leave you with “Disobedience,” in her memory.

Soccer: the Biology, Chemistry, Physiology, Physics, and Psychology of The Beautiful Game

Mildew and mysteries

It’s been one of the rainiest summers on record here, and last week we had a spell of sticky heat. The towels never dry properly, and it’s hard to keep mildew at bay. As July dripped on, the combination of wet weather, a plumbing issue that blossomed into a partial bathroom remodel (that is still in progress), and preparations for sending the Teenager halfway around the world alone led me to that mainstay of reading for fretful times: mysteries.

A couple of customers at Gibson’s asked about Alexander McCall Smith titles this month, which made me realize I’d fallen behind in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. I caught up with Miracle At Speedy Motors and Teatime for the Traditionally Built. Like the Miss Read books, I find this series totally absorbing and transporting. When I’m reading them, I’m in Botswana, in the world of these characters.  It’s a world that works according to a code of decency and goodness — with a few bad apples to provide the famous lady detective with cases. I would like to sit down to some bush tea with Mma Ramotswe.

I’d heard good things about another female detective, Flavia de Luce, the protagonist of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. This British mystery set in 1950 combines history, social criticism, chemistry, and stamp collecting to create a complex but fascinating story. Flavia is a very clever girl, and an amatuer chemist, and her personality is spunky and yet endearing.  I could picture the rest of the characters clearly as well as the setting — a crumbling old “great house” in 1950’s Britain, the nearby village, and a traditional boys’ boarding school.

I like a book whose setting plays nearly as important a role in the story as the characters, and I think not enough writers do both well. Author Alan Bradley won the Debut Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association for The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, and he has several further adventures planned for Flavia.  There were more bodies in this book than I usually like (I prefer my mysteries to be long on puzzle solving and short on murder), but I enjoyed it very much.

I also read Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane last month. I was intrigued by the premise of the novel — a woman doing research for her PhD reconnects with a long line of female ancestors as she tries to locate a lost book that she thinks will reveal the truth about witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts. Overall, I enjoyed the story, but there were a few distractions: a love interest that didn’t really advance the plot except in a fairly contrived way, and a villain who is more annoying than evil, and whose dastardly deed seems very far fetched.

Also Connie, the main character, is fairly dim for a woman who is supposed to be a brilliant talent in the Harvard history department, and is kind of  a whiner. I was rooting to like the book, both because I was trying to get the author to come to the store and because I read that Howe wrote the book for NaNoWriMo, which I love.  I didn’t dislike it, but it wasn’t fantastic.

A book I read in July that was fantastic was Man Gone Down, which I read about in the New York Times after author Michael Thomas won the  International Impac Dublin Literary Award. What made this a great book? I’ll never be black or male, but Thomas dragged me into the emotional turmoil of his protagonist, who is both, and made it possible for me to identify with him even though we have almost no life experiences in common.

I woke up at night wondering about things that happen in the book.  I fell asleep thinking about what might happen next. The writing was emotionally raw but also incredibly compelling.  I could see every scene vividly. And in a way, this novel was a psychological mystery, because until the final scene, I wasn’t sure how things were going to turn out. Wow. Please write more, Mr. Thomas.

The Teenager read more about David Beckham, finishing most of  The Beckham Experiment, which his sister gave him for his “fake birthday” (an early celebration we had before he departed for Germany, where next week, he will turn sixteen).  He said it was a very intriguing book, which verified what he’d come to suspect — Beckham not only hasn’t transformed American soccer, he acted more like a typical spoiled superstar than a team player who’d come to lift all boats. He took along another soccer book to read on the plane, The Magnificent 7’s, which is about the men who’ve worn number 7 for Manchester United.

The preteen and I read The Serial Garden, which I was reading aloud, until she once again insisted she doesn’t care to be read to. I absolutely adored this book, which reminded me of all the reasons I love Joan Aiken, as well as Edward Eager and Roald Dahl — writers whose child protagonists are smart, capable, and independent and who have all kinds of adventures in large part because they believe then can. It was a fine choice of reading just before sending one’s first born halfway around the world alone, because the kids in The Serial Garden manage every challenge quite well.

The Preteen is now on the fourth of the Books of Ember, and says so far the first one, City of Ember, and the third, People of Sparks, are her favorites of the series. She also read Life As We Knew It, which she pronounced “ok.” She’s been noodling around the Harry Potter books, after attending the midnight opening of the latest movie (she stayed awake, and only had to poke me once).

The Computer Scientist is reading Harry Potter for the first time. He’s on the third book and seems to be enjoying them.  He was tired of never fully understanding conversations with the Preteen, who lives and breathes all things Potter. We finished reading Farenheit 451 in our literary criticism circle before the Teenager left.  We all really enjoyed it and had some good conversations. The Teenager requested we read “something ancient” in the fall.

I mulled this request and started looking into Greek literature, wondering where to begin. Then, plans for his other fall studies began to coalesce, and he signed up for an Oxford University online course on Vikings. He suggested we read Norse literature as a perfect complement to his historical interests. I’m now digging into ideas for where to begin there. Any Norse lit. experts who wish to make suggestions, please do! Naturally I’m thrilled to watch him carry out my bookconscious theory of interconnectedness — one interesting book leads to another, and our interests in life lead us to more reading.

In fact, one book literally led me another this month on the public library’s sale shelf: The Human Story by James C. Davis. It looked like a readable world history survey, but I didn’t buy it the first time I saw it. I thought about it for a couple of days, asked the kids, both of whom expressed mild interest, and looked for it again the next time I went to the library. When I went back I pulled the book from the sale shelf and discovered it was right next to The Moon Is Always Female, by Marge Piercy. So I got that, too, glad the shelf had granted me a gift for not impulsively buying The Human Story the first time.

I’ve been a Marge Piercy fan for awhile. Her poetry is amazing — readable but with a depth that offers more upon each re-reading. The novels I’ve read are similar — good stories well told, which are intricate, deep, and mind-expanding as well. The poems in The Moon Is Always Female didn’t disappoint. Piercy explains the sections of the book here.

I enjoyed both sections. One poem that exemplifies how Piercy takes an ordinary thing and makes magic with it is “The Damn Cast.” A poem about wearing a cast? Not only is it descriptive, capturing the feeling of dragging around in a cast, but also by the end of the poem, Piercy has touched on disability and the human capacity for a range of pain and pleasure. And Piercy is funny — another poem, called “Attack of the squash people,” describes an overabundance of zucchini in a way that will amaze you as both familiar and brilliantly original.

Next up at the bookconscious household? I’m currently reading The Frozen Thames and enjoying it, and checked out three books by Andre Dubus — two collections of essays and one of stories. I find that as my mind travels over the sea to my elder child, it’s easier to bring it back home by coaxing it to read a finite thing — one story, one essay, one article. I also have a big thick novel on hand — The Gone Away World. In fact, if it wasn’t for the damn chores (bathroom project, errands, laundry, etc.), I’d plan to spend all weekend in the hammock, wallowing in missing my child and reading good books.

To be clear, the trouble with the Teenager being gone isn’t so much his physical absence — after all, I’m really thrilled for him and delighted he can have this experience. It’s just really hit the Computer Scientist and I hard to have our firstborn venture off to train with a German soccer club and have a European adventure, handling airport security and customs alone, managing a credit card, and generally letting us know he’s practically grown up.

I did bring home a couple of books about German history from the Ohrstrom Library before he left, and I’ve dipped in to those here and there. And I’m keeping up with the New York Times and the usual pile of magazines and journals besides all these books.  But nothing I read has been able to distract me from the looming facts: our elder child is going to be leaving for longer, at least semi-permanent periods of time in the not so far away future. The Preteen will only be a few years behind.

I’m off to read myself to sleep.

Fiction and food, the familiar and the faraway

I read a variety of books this month,  but I noticed as I looked over the list that many of them, fiction and nonfiction alike, featured food prominently. Location mattered, too, as I gravitated towards books set near and far, from Seattle to New England, from New York to Paris, to the mountains of Bhutan. I guess I was craving a virtual getaway. The rest of the household stuck to some familiar themes. I’ll start with their reading.

The Computer Scientist, who is a former Marine, enjoyed The Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan. He says it’s a great read for anyone interested in the dynamics and challenges of Special Forces and what they faced in Afghanistan. He also read I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson, because Stephen King cites Matheson as an influence in his writing. He found the stories enjoyable and says some are intriguing enough to re-read.

The Preteen just read an Enola Holmes book by Nancy Springer, The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline. She pronounces this latest mystery featuring Sherlock’s younger sister, “great.” She says she likes Enola because she “sticks up for herself.”  She enjoyed the Summer Reading Kickoff at Gibson’s, and started reading a series Nancy Keane recommended, the Books of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau.

Bookconscious regulars know the Teenager lives and breathes soccer. His summer reading, and writing, is focused on the beautiful game. He recently read Soccer in a Football World and Beckham: Both Feet on the Ground: An Autobiography. He’s also been enjoying the New York Times. We recently restarted our home delivery of the paper, and he’s been impressed with the soccer coverage, the business section, and the paper’s global scope.

We  finished reading T.S. Eliot’s “The Four Quartets” in our literary circle. In an earlier bookconscious post, I explained that the Teenager requested Eliot and we’ve been reading our way through some of his major poems since April. He found “The Four Quartets” very appealing because he felt it was a little easier to penetrate than “The Waste Land,” but still full of intriguing language and fascinating imagery. When we talked about “Little Gidding” he said he liked the storytelling voice that seemed to take over the poem.

I enjoyed “The Four Quartets” very much myself. I liked the way Eliot refers back to some of his own earlier work and gives readers of “The Waste Land” a sense of completion — many of the disturbing spiritual and emotional disconnect is restored and reconnected in the later poem. As a not very accomplished student of mindfulness, I think Eliot masterfully describes the trouble with the human tendency to look backwards and forwards, rather than seeing what’s happening right now in this moment

Eliot also clearly values literary history and is very concerned with war and its inevitable connections to both the past and future. I think his poetry reflects a mindfulness influenced by his Western perspectives, recognizing the suffering our attachments and desires cause us, scrutinizing our historical mistakes, and trying to carry the best of human experience (including great literature) with us as we move into the future.

The way Eliot synthesizes so many influences — grail mythology, Hindu texts, Buddhist philosophy, Christian spirituality and mysticism, and literature from ancient to modern — makes his work endlessly intriguing. He’s definitely an example of the bookconscious theory of interconnectedness. It sometimes feels like he puts everything he’s ever read, and everywhere he’s ever been or thought of going (as well as a few imagined locations) into his work.

The Computer Scientist found some useful secondary sources at Ohrstrom Library that helped us untangle the layers of meaning in “The Four Quartets.” Two were The Composition of the Four Quartets by Helen Gardner and T.S. Eliot: The Longer Poems: The Wasteland, Ash Wednesday, Four Quartets by Derek Traversi. He also found artist David Finn’s inviting book of paintings, Evocations of Four Quartets, from Ohrstrom library, which added a whole new dimension to our Eliot explorations. I would love to see these works in person.

Another artist whose work I admired this month is Brian Andreas. I picked up Volume 5, Hearing Voices, in his series of “Mostly True Stories and Drawings” at the Five Colleges Book Sale last spring. Andreas writes in his introduction that his creative process is about listening: “Every line is a whisper of memory, of my life at that moment.” He suggests, “There may be answers hidden in the quick connections of this book. Or maybe they’re just beyond the edges, waiting for us to hear.”

An example of the stories in Hearing Voices is Invention. Story or art? You decide. I took this book to the beach (one of the only days in June that it didn’t rain) and both kids thought it was funny and strange.

Eliot’s poems and Andreas’s stories were the two things I read that had nothing to with food. One book I very much enjoyed focused on what animals eat, specifically deer, wild turkeys, and other New Hampshire wildlife. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has a new book coming out in September, The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons From the Natural World. It’s the first “ARC” or advanced reading copy, I’ve read as events coordinator at Gibson’s Bookstore. I’m working on setting up a date for Thomas to come read from the book and sign at the store. Watch our events calendar, because she’ll be coming in the fall.

In The Hidden Life of Deer, Thomas writes about what she learned as she fed deer and turkeys near her home after the  the oaks failed to produce their usual crop of acorns a few years ago. It turns out there is a very good reason for the dearth of acorns, which Thomas explains. She decided to help her animal neighbors avoid starvation, and she doesn’t shy away from discussing the arguments against putting out corn, the possibility that when she fed the wildlife she was “meddling” with nature, and why she chose to do so.

In fact, one of the nicest things about this book is that although Thomas writes beautifully and presents a great deal of very specific scientific information, you get the feeling she’s just telling you the story as you sit with her. I liked hearing about her interactions with a hunter neighbor and the NH Fish and Game Department, as well as her observations about the deer’s family groups.

Thomas’s knowledge and exploration of the natural world began when she was just a girl, and she shares some of the formative experiences that have fed her interest in animals and plants and their symbiotic relationships. She has a beautiful way of elucidating these interdependencies, both among flora and fauna and between humans and the wild.

I found these passages fascinating and educational.  Thomas talks about inadvertently destroying a “refugium of flies” in her shed, something I’d never heard of.  And her distress over the chain reaction she accidentally set off when ridding her office of rats gave me pause.

Thomas’s musings on ethics, history, and biology, and her deep curiosity and keen observations, make The Hidden Life of Deer so much more than a well written, thoughtfully researched book on deer. How many people have ever heard a mouse sing? Who else has written about it? Thomas has a gift for this kind of remarkable detail. Look for her book this fall.

From a book that’s not yet in stores, to one I’ve had for years but left in the to-read pile until recently: Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey Into Bhutan by Jamie Zeppa. I’ve recently become friends with a refugee family from Bhutan, who’ve spent years in a camp in Nepal waiting to either go home or be resettled. I remembered that I had the book on my shelf after we talked about their leaving Bhutan.

Zeppa arrived in the country just before the unrest. She was there as a volunteer teacher with a Canadian NGO. Beyond Earth and Sky is her memoir of moving to Bhutan, overcoming culture shock, embracing Buddhism, teaching in an elementary school and then in a college English department, and falling in love.

Beyond the Sky and the Earth provides an honest look at what many international volunteers go through as they not only adapt to their new surroundings, but also feel differently about their native culture.  I enjoyed reading about Zeppa’s personal transformation, especially because she was honest about the setbacks she experienced as well as the discoveries. If you liked Eat, Pray, Love, but felt like it was a little unrealistic, try Beyond the Sky and the Earth.

Zeppa’s  descriptions of Bhutanese food, culture, and landscape transported me away from rainy New Hampshire, and helped me figure out what I’ve been eating at my friends’ house. But the book that made me hungriest this month was Giulia Melucci ’s I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti. Melucci is coming to Gibson’s on August 5th, for a reading sponsored by the Women’s Fund of New Hampshire.

Her memoir of life as a young professional in New York, looking for love and loving to cook, is a fun read. Melucci writes fondly of her family and friends and even some of her exes, but my favorite part of the book is the mouth watering meal descriptions and recipes. I dare you not to nosh while reading this book — I went through large bowls of popcorn, myself.

Both Zeppa and Melucci not only describe great meals, but also write beautifully about places they love — Bhutan and Canada, New York and Connecticut.  Even though Melucci’s locations aren’t as exotic, she manages to bring them to life. I could see all the places these talented women described, from Brooklyn neighborhoods to mountain trails, and I really love a book that can take me somewhere, whether it’s familiar or faraway.

Seattle is a relatively familiar place, since we lived in the area for five years. The Computer Scientist worked for a large software company located in nearby Redmond, Washington. Seattle region has long been a foodie paradise. Matthew Amster-Burton’s memoir, Hungry Monkey, describes his determination that fatherhood was not going to end his forays into Seattle’s many markets and restaurants.

I enjoyed some of this book, but ended up skimming the rest, mainly because it reminded me of many reasons that our five years in Seattle were some of the loneliest and most frustrating of my life. It’s not Amster-Burton’s fault, personally. But everything from his hyphenated name to his trendy eating habits (I suspect that even the little ethnic hole in the walls he slums in are hot spots with other slumming urbanites) brought back bad memories. I suppose I should be thankful, because our time in Seattle brought us “home” to New Hampshire.

Also, I had such a hard time fitting in with young hip parents in the Northwest that I found my way into my first ever book group, which met a local branch library. I was the youngest member by at least a dozen years or more, but those women eased my loneliness and helped me find my tribe: book people. Which led me, eventually, to feel so at home in New Hampshire, a place brimming with book people.

New Hampshire was more like Seattle this month, as we had one of the grayest, rainiest Junes on record. I spent many a late night curled up listening to rain on the roof and reading a novel. I also finished Olive Kitteridge and discussed it with Gibson’s Book Club. We talked for a couple of hours straight about Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer winning linked story collection.

While I enjoyed reading Olive Kitteridge, I had a hard time with all of the “issues” — every story featured something appalling straight out of the headlines. It felt like too much to me. A linked story collection, also set in Maine, that I liked better was Monica Wood’s Ernie’s Ark.

I also read Adiga Aravind’s The White Tiger, Alice Hoffman’s The Story Sisters, and Elinor Lipman’s The Family Man. I enjoyed all three, for entirely different reasons.  Like the nonfiction I gravitated towards this month, these three novels depend on a strong sense of place and feature mouth watering descriptions of food.

The White Tiger won the Man Booker Prize last year. Set in India, the novel follows the progress of a young man, Balram Halwai, from his village to the city as a servant to the son of one of the “big men” who control politics and business back in “The Darkness,” as Balram calls the countryside. Balram tells the story in a series of letters to Wen Jiabao (the Chinese premier) written over seven nights after he has found freedom.

Like Slumdog Millionaire, The White Tiger presents the cavernous divide between the rich and poor in contemporary India, as well as the ongoing tension between Hindus and Muslims and the corruption that taints all levels of government. Balram calls his story “The Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian,” in reference to his unfinished education and limited opportunities.  Balram ultimately pulls himself out of poverty, but his tale is far from uplifting or inspiring, although it was hard to put down.

Adiga, who was a journalist for many years, recently told NHPR’s Virginia Prescott that “India is mind bogglingly complex” and that he sets out to to portray the “social complexity of life in India” in his fiction. His prose not only brings the narrative to life, but also gives readers who’ve never been to India the sights, sounds, and smells his characters are experiencing in vivid detail. He certainly tells a compelling story.

Both The Story Sisters and The Family Man are well written, entertaining, good old fashioned yarns. The Story Sisters is the more complex of the two books, with snippets of a fair tale interwoven with the story of three sisters growing up with a single mother in Long Island, and a grandmother in Paris. After a traumatic experience as a young girl, the passionately imaginative eldest sister creates the fairy tale world the sisters escape into, and her yearning for an alternate reality ultimately leads her into a troubled adolescence.

While the novel is a story of her coming of age and the impact it has on the rest of the family, Hoffman also gives attention to the other sisters, their mother, and an array of secondary characters in a series of intense subplots. It’s a haunting, layered book that emphasizes human resilience and the power of love, without becoming maudlin or spiraling into cliche.

Hoffman brought Long Island, Manhattan, Paris, and the New Hampshire North Country to life. And like Giulia Melucci cooking for the men she dates in New York, the youngest Story sister cooks first for an elderly couple who find love late in life, and then for a family friend she eventually falls in love with. You’ll want to go to Paris when you finish this book. Or at least cook something French.

The Family Man is also set in New York and is the story of a newly retired lawyer, Henry, who reconnects with his step-daughter after his ex-wife is widowed, and also finds a partner after nearly giving up on love. Lipman’s book is as astutely observant of social mores and as subtly hilarious as a Jane Austen novel. The ex-wife is a funny but humane send-up of wealthy New York society wives. She’s also the catalyst for the novel’s narrative, which brings together a lovable cast of characters in a narrative full of crazy twists and turns and an “all’s well that ends well” sensibility. If you like social comedy, try The Family Man.

Last week I finished Mudbound, ahead of schedule (it’s the Gibson’s Book Club July selection. Join us July13 at 7 pm or August 17 at noon to discuss it).  I really enjoyed the shifting point of view Hillary Nelson employs in telling the story. That said, I would have liked to hear more from some of the six characters who speak, and I think it would have been interesting to hear the racist father-in-law’s perspective.

Mudbound is set in postwar Mississippi, where the characters are dealing with the financial and physical challenges of farming, as well as racism, the social dynamic of sharecropping, and post war trauma. A dramatic book, Mudbound relies on personalities and perceptions as much as plot. The land itself, from the muddy Delta cotton country to the battlefields of WWII, has a starring role.

I’ve begun reading Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas. Yesterday I read one of the most creative running scenes I’ve ever come across anywhere. I’m really enjoying the prose, and I pointed out to the Teenager this afternoon that  “The Four Quartets” figures in the story. The bookconscious literary circle is discussing the first third of Farenheit 451 this week. I clipped this photo of Ray Bradbury and hung it near the kitchen sink, and I’m happy to be re-reading one of my favorite books.

A final thought on connections and the nourishment of books. My kids had eschewed my reading aloud for months. They came to my first preschool story time this week at Gibson’s, and this evening my son told the Computer Scientist he’d forgotten how much fun my story times are. My daughter agreed. The entire exchange lasted maybe thirty seconds, but I sensed an opening.

A few days ago, I’d brought home The Serial Garden from the library. I loved Joan Aiken’s books when I was young. However, since I suggested it, the Preteen glanced skeptically at the cover and said, “maybe,” in that special terse tone of voice she reserves just for me. But this evening, as the busy weekend drew to a close, and fireflies flickered in the deepening dark, I began to read aloud. They both listened. Stories, good ones, take us away even from our selves, into a place where it doesn’t matter how old we are, how we’re feeling, how awkward and uncomfortable the world seems, how grown up we want to be.

Share a book with someone tonight, or with yourself. Let it fill you up.

Powerful personalities, poems, and promises

It’s rainy and cool here in New Hampshire as I start this post, perfect weather for getting into pajamas after supper and curling up with a good book. I have somewhere to be, however. It’s a place I’ve mentioned several times on bookconscious: Gibson’s Bookstore. Tonight will be different: I’m the new events coordinator for the store!

I admit I’ve been in a more or less constant state of panicky excitement since accepting the job. “Cool, I’m going to meet so many authors! Aagghh, when will I write? It’s nice to have someone be so confident I’ll do a good job. Ack, what if I can’t figure out how to organize more events, increase attendance etc.? Oh stop worrying, you’ll do fine!”

Despite the interruptions from this annoying internal dialogue, I have managed to read most evenings, and the rest of the family, who are all utterly unruffled by my new status as an employed person, have all kinds of good books going. So without further ado, here’s what we’re reading in the bookconscious household.

The preteen is back to reading Royal Diairies, which she enjoys because they are historical fiction accounts of famous women’s girlhoods.  She’s also reading Live Free and Eat Pie, which I recommended, because the Computer Scientist took her and her best friend to one of Rebecca Rule’s storytelling evenings. They all thought it was hilarious fun, and apparently, he entertained them on the way there with an amusing anecdote about getting a cocktail straw stuck up his nose at a swanky party at the Superintendent’s house when he was a midshipman first class at the Naval Academy.

The teenager continues to read and study T.S. Eliot. He’s analyzing “What the Thunder Said,” which is the final section of The Waste Land, in order to write an essay. Next we’re going to read and discuss “The Four Quartets.”  He asked me the other day if we can keep reading poetry for our literary discussion group, instead of going back to novels. He’s also reading Instant Physics: From Aristotle to Einstein, and Beyond, because he’s started a physics course and wanted to supplement it with a good read. Kid after my own heart.

The Computer Scientist is reading T.S. Eliot along with us, and is also digging into Rick Atkinson’s The Day of Battle, which is the second in a planned trilogy about WWII. He’s also got a bookmark in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Like me, he often has more than one book going. The other one on his nightstand with a bookmark in it is A Place on Water, which is a book of essays by three friends — Wesley McNair, Bill Roorbach, and Robert Kimber — who have “camps” (New England lingo for cabins) on a pond in Maine.

I just started a book set in Maine, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. It’s the Gibson’s book club June selection, and it also just won the Pulitzer Prize.  I’ve just read the first of the book’s thirteen linked stories, called “Pharmacy,” and I really enjoyed it. The title character wasn’t the focus of the first story, and I’m looking forward to seeing how she pops up throughout the book. My first impression of  Strout’s writing is that it’s not predictable, and by the end of the first story I really adored the main character, Henry.  “Pharmacy” is an emotionally rich tale without being overblown or gooey with sentimentality.

Another writer whose work I enjoyed in May who is far from “gooey,” or as they might say in England, “treacly” about emotional topics, is Carol Ann Duffy. Like Strout, her writing packs a strong emotional punch. When I read about her selection as poet laureate of England, I checked the local library for her books. They have two of her books for young readers, The Tear Thief, and Queen Munch and Nibble, which the Preteen pronounced, “really cool stories to read to younger children, with cool illustrations, especially in The Tear Thief.”

Unfortunately, I had to order Duffy’s poetry collections on inter-library loan, but that takes no time here in New Hampshire, and I soon read two: The World’s Wife and Feminine Gospels. Both were amazing. It’s a bit humbling to imagine the intellect and creativity behind these poems.

The poems in The World’s Wife are told from the point of view of women in famous men’s lives throughout history and mythology, while Feminine Gospels deals more generally with themes of womanhood and female experience.  Both are full of powerful personalities that come alive. In both books I was impressed with Duffy’s poem craft — the way the language sings in her hands, her inclusion of rhythm, rhyme and near rhyme in thoroughly modern ways, the way she weaves voices and narratives. Lovely.

In May I read two other poetry books. One caught my eye in February, when it was Darwin’s 200th birthday: Darwin: A Life In Poems, by Ruth Padel. Padel happens to be Darwin’s great great granddaughter, but she is also a scholar, poet, BBC radio presenter, musician, and writer of acclaimed nonfiction books on everything from Greek views on the inner life of humans to tiger conservation. She’s led a fascinating life, and it’s the reading public’s good fortune that she is a talented writer who shares her experiences on the page.

Darwin was interesting because Padel used a variety of poetic forms, but also wrote in fairly contemporary style, with lots of enjambment (lines that wrap around), natural rhythm, and near rhyme rather than formal rhyme and meter. The stories of Darwin’s life told in the poems were also interesting — I’ve never read much about him beyond what one learns in history or science classes, and in the myriad magazine articles that appeared this year. The family stories, and Padel’s portrait of the Darwins’ marriage, were particularly fascinating. Interesting, too, to have these poems so recently in my mind as I began Olive Kitteridge, because Strout’s stories look closely at marriage.

The other poetry I read in May was a book I heard about on the Knopf poem-a-day newsletter in April, Du Fu: A Life in Poetry, translated by David Young. In his introduction, Young acknowledges earlier translators of the great Chinese poet’s work, as well as other poets who encouraged Young as he worked on the new translations, including Charles Simic, who referred to Du Fu as “a swell guy.”

I’d had a taste of Du Fu, or Tu Fu as he is sometimes known, when the kids and I learned about China. I enjoy many kinds of Asian poetry, especially Chinese classical poems and Japanese forms including senryu, haiku, and haibun. Young’s book is not only enjoyable poetry, but also informative translation and editing — his frequent notes provide historical, cultural, and biographical context that enriches the poems. It’s especially interesting reading Du Fu today because he wrote as a “golden” time in China was descending into upheaval.

Upheaval is a major theme in Fields of Light:A Son Remembers His Heroic Father by Joseph Hurka.  Bookconscious readers know I took a workshop from Hurka at NH Writers’ Project’s Writer’s Day this year, and read his novel last month. I enjoyed this memoir even more. Hurka visited his aunt in the Czech Republic in 1993, shortly after the fall of communism. He visits places important both to Czech history and his own family’s history, and tries to deepen his understanding of his father as well as the country.

Hurka’s writing is beautiful — evocative but uncluttered. As my grandmother would say, (and this is the highest praise she gives a book) there’s not one extra word.  Most of all, I loved Fields of Light because of the way Hurka seeks connections between what he knows and what he is discovering as he immerses himself in his journey. As an added bonus, I learned a great deal about Czech history, too.

Last month, I learned about Irish history around the time of WWI while reading the Gibson’s book club selection, A Long Long Way. Author Sebastian Barry gives readers another glimpse into Ireland’s past in his more recent novel, The Secret Scripture. This time, the book is set mostly in Ireland, and is told through two diaries the main characters are writing. One is a psychiatrist, and the other is a patient in an asylum which is being closed. The doctor is trying to asses whether the  patient, a 100 year old woman, can be discharged or should be moved to the new facility.

I enjoyed the story, although like his earlier book, Barry goes to the bone emotionally, and parts of The Secret Scripture were painful to read. The language was strikingly different — perhaps more modern, certainly less musical than the prose of A Long Long Way. The ending caught me off guard. I’m not sure if it was because I had less time to read this month and stayed up far too late, so just wasn’t alert to the clues, or if it really was an unexpected twist.

One reason I had less time to read other books was that I promised a friend I’d read both Concord Reads 2009 selections. Bookconscious fans know I chaired last year’s CR, which is our town’s “one book, one community” program. This year, the committee selected two books: Pay It Forward, a novel (and it turns out, not the first novel to use the phrase “pay it forward” and The Soloist, a nonfiction book. Both are well known as films, and both are about someone making a difference.

I won’t go into much detail now, because I am going to be leading book discussions about both titles in the fall, and I’ll be interested to report then whether other readers shared my initial impressions. Also, I’ll re-read the books before then and perhaps come up with some new thoughts.

I enjoyed Pay It Forward (although I thought the ending was fairly predictable and disappointing). The author, Catherine Ryan Hyde, employs a shifting point of view that was engaging. By the end of the book, I cared about the three main characters, and some of the minor characters were very interesting. Towards the end of the book, although I had guessed the outcome, I was intrigued by some of the turns in the plot.

I’m afraid that I didn’t enjoy The Soloist, which I hope means I’ll lead a good discussion because I’ll add a bit of dissent. The story itself is interesting, and Nathaniel Ayers and all the other people dealing with mental illness deserve the attention and help that’s come their way as a result of Steve Lopez’s columns.

I gave the book an “okay” on Goodreads, mainly because I got the impression it was not so much a well crafted book as a bunch of columns looking for a more lucrative deal and a bigger spotlight. In fairness, there may be good reasons for Lopez to seek those things — as he reminds readers repeatedly, the attention he brought to Skid Row in L.A. caught the eye of people in power who could bring about change.

Every book I read this month was chuck full of promises — made, kept, broken, bent, modified, renegotiated. From Du Fu’s lament over imperial posts that never worked out to Darwin’s struggle with his wife’s wishes that he resolve religion and science in his work, to Barry’s and Hyde’s fictional betrayals and Lopez’s struggle to get Nathaniel Ayers off the street, promises everywhere, many of them unfulfilled or unfulfilling.

Eliot explores the way people don’t remain true to each other or to any kind of lasting belief system in the Wasteland and end up leading empty lives. Carol Ann Duffy and Elizabeth Strout look at tough women able to varying degrees to navigate all the treachery the world might throw at them without totally losing it. Hurka faces the extent to which his father’s generation dealt with communism’s false, cruel promises after the long struggle against fascism.

But despite all the disappointment, deceit, treachery, selfishness, betrayal — each one of these books leaves at least a tiny pinhole for hope to fill. In every case, the characters I read about this month looked around at their imperfect, broken world and all the people hurting each other and letting each other down and found a way to survive. In fact, the common thread seems to be that even if they often do the wrong thing, humans are almost all gifted with the ability to go on, get up, try again, right their lives and make them work.

And that, when you think about it, is one of the reasons literature exists, to remind us that no matter how bad things get, we’ll get by. Even Eliot’s dark Waste Land ends with “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih” — which his note says is like “the peace which passeth all understanding,” beyond our human capacity to process, but with us, abiding in us and carrying us through, regardless of our frailty and our endless capacity to fail. Something bigger than any of us helps us transcend the worst in us.

What would Thoreau think?

April turned out to be a busy month, but I did find time to read. I suspect that the author of one of the books I finished, Walden, would not think much of either my hectic schedule or my eclectic reading. I started reading Walden last year, when the kids and I were learning about Thoreau and friends.  I ended up setting it aside, not only because I had other things to read, but also because Thoreau is a bit of a scold, and I wasn’t in the mood for his lectures.

After our visit to Concord in March, I decided to pick it up again. I tried to tune out the lecturing tone, and managed to finish the book. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it, and I think Thoreau was an incredible thinker and writer. I enjoyed Walden overall. It’s just that when Thoreau gets on his high horse about certain topics — including reading — he sounds a bit like a modern day television pundit, railing about a manufactured controversy. Even when I agree, maybe especially when I agree, I hate it when someone makes his or her points by disdaining opposing views.

I can generally identify with many of the things Thoreau gets hot and bothered about, like people not noticing how their “stuff” is ruling their lives, or how they are rushing along through life without really needing to, or missing out on the serenity and even maybe the sacredness of the natural world as they hurry up and “improve” the land for man’s purposes. It’s amazing actually, that Thoreau was asking questions in his time that we have still not answered for ourselves as a society today, and that many of us don’t ever answer for ourselves personally.

But even though I admire him and believe there is a much to learn from Walden and from his essays, Thoreau sometimes aggravates me with his harping. The chapter of Walden on reading irked me the most, even though I think Thoreau makes some very good points. It bothers him that some people haven’t read the “ancient classics in the language in which they were written,” (at the time, he tells us, there aren’t any translations of Homer, Aeschylus, or Virgil into English), and laments that his fellow citizens read the Bible but don’t even know other cultures have sacred scriptures, let alone what they teach.

OK, Henry, I’m with you so far. Sure, the classics are an amazing repository of human thought and beauty (although I can’t say much about reading them in the original, because I’ve only read translations). And I’m a big fan of learning about other belief systems, and learning from them about the universality of human experience, especially the seeking we all do for meaning, ethics, and purpose.

But Thoreau isn’t content just to long for a more broadly educated populous, steeped in the classics and comparative religion. He is also offended that not enough people are intellectuals. “Most men learned to read to serve a paltry convenience,” he grouses, “of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing, yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to while the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.” Good grief, this makes me cringe.

He also complains, “Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted of the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading.”  And if that’s not bad enough, “The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell.”  By now I was muttering to myself.

The  librarian in me chuckled a bit at Thoreau’s distress over the light reading material available at Concord’s library, such as novels. Some things never change –  library’s today still deal with patron complaints about what a library has in its collection (or doesn’t). Thoreau adds with disgust, “We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate, and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsmen who cannot read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects.” Kind of makes you want to wrap your beach read in a towel, doesn’t it?

Thoreau has good intentions, beyond all this complaining. He believes that people would be better for reading good books, explaining, “The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones . . . . Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn liberality.”  I have to agree with his underlying premise, that understanding our lives in the context of man’s universal, timeless quest for wisdom would expand our minds, improve us and our world.

He is disgusted that school ends when one is grown, and calls for universal life learning: “It is time we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.” As an autodidact trying to raise kids who know that learning isn’t a kids’ activity that happens in particular buildings during particular times, I couldn’t agree more.

But I have to say that I occasionally enjoy “chick lit,” I thought Nanny Diaries was hilarious social commentary, and I firmly believe what my Grandmother taught me: when times are tough, take comfort in a nice Agatha Christie mystery or maybe a Mrs. Pollifax spy adventure.  I don’t think telling people they are wasting their minds if they read for fun is fair. Who knows what connections they’re making? It’s like junk food in my mind — it’s not good for you, and you don’t need it, but a little bit isn’t going to kill you. And no one likes being around someone who stands next to the chips and dip at a party and lectures everyone within earshot about the dangers of fat and salt.

I encourage my family to read good books, and if you’ve followed bookconscious you know we’ve even discussed what makes a “great” book. A little bit of my schooled mind cringes, like Thoreau’s, when I see them reading comic strips instead of something I would classify as literature. But I am not a book snob, and I’ve learned that there’s philosophy in Calvin and Hobbes, and Foxtrot frequently illustrates the Computer Scientist’s contention that “math is life.” As a former librarian and life long “libraryologist” as the C.S. calls me, I’ve come to believe that if kids are reading something they love, it doesn’t matter what it is. Offer them a varied reading diet and they’ll get enough fruits and vegetables, but don’t deny them cheese puffs or candy in moderation.

I fear Thoreau would scold librarians for adding graphic novels to their collections, or featuring movie tie-in books. But I feel a little better knowing that even back in 19th century Concord, a place overflowing with writers and intellectuals and a well-read population, a place where many a farmer had learned a little Latin or Greek in his youth, where there was no television or world wide web or massively multiplayer online role-playing games, someone was already wringing his hands over the End of Reading. Because it didn’t happen then, and I don’t believe it will happen now. Writers will keep writing, and readers, reading.

In fact, despite the tanking economy, I’ve read recently that bookstores and libraries are reporting more patrons than ever. Reading is inexpensive entertainment, it lasts, and it can be a social event. I’ve invited my neighbor to come along on Monday, when Gibson’s book club will be discussing our May book, A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry.

Barry is a playwright and poet as well as a novelist. The protagonist of A Long, Long Way is Willie Dunn, brother of Annie Dunn, title character of Barry’s earlier novel. Annie Dunn also appears in Barry’s award winning play, The Steward of Christendom. That play, in turn, was based in part on Barry’s own great-grandfather. In an interview Barry mentions other experiences and family stories that made their way into A Long, Long Way. It’s a beautiful example of the Bookconscious Theory of Interconnectedness.

A Long, Long Way is, first of all, gorgeous. Barry’s language is so poetic, I could hear the book in my head as I read. As a novel, it’s tight and well crafted. The story is hard — Willie Dunn serves in the trenches of WWI, and as the war goes on not only does he deal with the horror but also with the political and social turmoil brewing in Ireland, and the fact that his service in the war will bring him personal troubles. Even when you want to turn away, the book’s terrible beauty holds you.

Like Willie Dunn and the men he comes to know in war, the reader can’t help but wonder how anyone growing up can possibly sort through the world’s propaganda and the things we’re told in childhood, on the long way towards figuring out what not only who we are but what is real and true and how to think independently. Willie leaves Ireland sure of what he knows and loves and believes, and experiences disillusionment but also transformation. We see him come of age, bringing the core of himself through the terror, making his way, finding family in his comrades at arms.

I won’t spoil the plot for you by telling anymore. I will add that I am so taken with Barry’s prose that I plan to check out The Secret Scripture and Annie Dunn in the future, and to try to track down his poetry on inter-library loan. The rhythm and lilt of his sentences reminded me of Seamus Heaney’s poems.

Speaking of WWI and of poetry, you may recall that the Teenager requested we read T.S. Eliot in April for our lit crit circle. He was struck by the quote on the National Poetry Month poster: “Do I dare disturb the universe?” So far we’ve read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and the first two parts of “The Waste Land.” Last weekend as we discussed “The Burial of the Dead,” and “A Game of Chess,” the Teenager pronounced Eliot a snob. All those literary references — he just has to rub his smarty-pants knowledge in our faces. Of course, Thoreau might point out that if we’d had the kind of classical education he urges, and stayed away from novels and comics, we’d be in a better position to understand.

And yet, The Teenager doesn’t dislike “The Waste Land,” nor did he dislike “Prufrock,” at least not entirely. He’s impressed by the language. It’s also somewhat satisfying to try and penetrate what seems like such utter bloody weirdness on first glance. The Computer Scientist and I let him know that we too are somewhat irritated by the know-it-all obscurity of the references and the hoity toity tone of the notes — where Eliot makes it clear he expects his readership to be as well read as he is. But we are persevering because we all want to know what made this poem so influential, and to understand it as best we can.

A number of secondary sources are helping us, including From Ritual to Romance and The Golden Bough, which Eliot mentions in his notes, and some annotated hypertext versions of the poem online. Essays on “The Waste Land” are easy to find, including a collection at the Modern American Poetry site, hosted by University of Illinois.

I also picked up some books at Ohrstrom Library: The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, edited and annotated by Lawrence Rainey; The Waste Land: A Poem of Memory and Desire by Nancy K. Gish; and Valerie Eliot’s The Wasteland: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. We probably won’t read any of these cover to cover, but referring to them and then discussing what we’ve learned helps unlock the poem.

Before the Dogs’ Night Out poetry reading I read Sharon Olds’ The Wellspring and Philip Schultz’s failure. Both poets write about family and love, life in a time of catastrophes, connections we seek. I go into more detail about their poems in my post on the reading.

On impulse one day at the library, I grabbed Contemporary Poetry of New England, an anthology edited by Jay Parini, from the poetry month display as I was about to check out. It’s an interesting collection, with some poems and poets new to me and others quite familiar. I was mystified that any collection of recent New England poetry could omit Donald Hall, but otherwise, I enjoyed it. Anthologies are great fun, and often lead me to seek out more of a particular poet.

After NH Writers’ Project Writers Day, I read Taking Down the Angel, a poetry collection by Jeff Friedman and Before, a novel by Joseph Hurka, because I took their workshops. Friedman’s poems in Taking Down the Angel are narrative, a little like Wesley NcNair’s, and I especially enjoyed his midrashic poems — pieces that enter a bibical story and add a new perspective, that serve as poetic commentary on the meaning and mystery of stories we think we know, telling them in new ways.

Hurka’s novel was not one I would normally have gravitated towards. I am a wimp when it comes to crime and suspense, and I tend to avoid anything that’s as scary as the newspaper. I’m glad I read Before, even though I didn’t care for the creepiest parts. Hurka’s writing is piercing. He must do scads of research, because the details of the characters’ lives are extremely fine tuned.

The main characters in Before are fascinating people — a former Czech resistance fighter and holocaust survivor living both in the present and in his memories as he undergoes therapy after a stroke and writes what he remembers, a college student struggling with her own losses as she tries to make life and art, and a disturbed criminal haunted by abuse who was once a very successful businessman.

Even the minor characters are vivid. Before is a short book, but dense. Through his interesting characters and a tense plot, Hurka explores memory and unconscious and the ways our interactions with other people are informed by what’s come before. I’ve got Hurka’s nonfiction book, Fields of Light: A Son Remembers His Heroic Father, on inter-library loan and I’m looking forward to it.

I haven’t started it yet because I had a couple of new books out of the library that I needed to finish first, since they have shorter loan periods. I’ve nearly finished Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel, who is not only a well known British poet but also Charles Darwin’s great-great grandaughter. The book is fascinating, as the poems tell Darwin’s life story, and Padel’s notes include family details she learned in letters and other research. I’m finding the structure of the book a bit overwhelming — in order to keep up with the story, you have to keep reading, but reading several poems in a row feels rushed.

The other new book I finished last week was a quick read. A few weeks ago on the way to Concord, Massachusetts, we heard Scott Simon interview Jeffrey Archer on Weekend Edition Saturday. They were talking about Archer’s new novel, Paths of Glory, which is a ficitonalized biography of George Mallory and an account of the British effort to summit Mt. Everest. The interview picqued my interest — Simon’s interviews have led me to many a new book — so I reserved Paths of Glory.

Thoreau would likely not approve. Archer’s book was a fun, easy read. He did a great deal of research but the book didn’t require me to stand on tip-toe or flex my intellectual muscles. What it required — what much reading requires — was a suspension of reality for the duration of the book, an escape into another world, fictional or real. No one knows for sure whether George Mallory made it to the top of Everest. But he led a fascinating life before he died on the mountain that had bewitched him since his youth. I’m never going to summit Everest, and it was a great deal of fun going along with Archer as he imagines what may or may not have happened.

Archer’s book was a great escape into history, adventure, and romance. And like A Long, Long Way, “The Waste Land,” and Before, Paths of Glory illuminated the utter waste of war, which wrecks lives and leaves whole cultures unalterably damaged. Authors since Thoreau’s beloved Homer have explored the ways men and women survive war and either heal themselves and each other or succumb to their wounds for the rest of their lives. No matter the form — poetry or prose, classic epic or best seller, highbrow literary masterpiece or mass market phenomenon, readers benefit from probing the ideas each author unearths and making connections for themselves.

April in paradise, part III: book buying heaven

My family knows I have a sixth sense that spots used book stores and sniffs out library sales. My inner reading deals beacon honed in on a brief notice about the Five Colleges Book Sale in The Concord Monitor’s “Livewell” insert several weeks ago. The sale, which has run since 1961 and raises money for scholarships, features 35,000-40,000 used books! To paraphrase Kevin Henkes’ picture book, Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse, all I could say was “Wow!”

Which is why I was up at 6:30 am last Saturday. I removed all non-essentials from my purse in order to save my arm and shoulder strength for bags of books, ate a good breakfast, packed a granola bar, and drove about an hour to Lebanon, NH. Then I waited in line, chatting with my fellow book nuts, for another hour. It’s easy to chat with fellow members of the book tribe — the young woman in front of me was thrilled that I recognized the Finnish characters on her handmade tote bag: Moomins.  We were all in a state of giddy anticipation, and by the time the doors opened at 9 am, the line wrapped back around the school. And oh, was it worth the wait!

The Five Colleges Book Sale is by far the best sale I have ever attended, anywhere. The folks who run the sale have thought of everything. There’s an ample supply of boxes in case your tote bags prove to be too heavy, and plenty of space to take boxes to sort. They even offer a box storage area so that if you have so many books you can’t easily push them around, you can leave your boxes while you continue to browse.

Roving volunteers constantly straighten the tables of books, restock from clearly marked tables where people can return any books they’ve had second thoughts about, and even offer express checkout for those people with only a few books. All of these efforts reduce the impact of dealers on the individual shopper, and I found the whole atmosphere pleasant and the volunteers knowledgeable and helpful. Even the dealers — who were there in large numbers, because this is the largest sale in New England, were polite to individual buyers, and I saw no cut-throat grabbing of prized titles, which happened at all the sales I attended in a large metropolis in the Northwest where the Computer Scientist once worked for a large software company.

Ahead of the sale, the website tantalized with a list of this year’s sale highlights. In fact, this list pushed me over the top — I was wavering, considering staying home with my family on Saturday to enjoy our strange taste of summer weather (we had record setting heat). But when I saw this list, I could not resist.  And we’re all glad I went.

I bought 36 books, and spent $50.50, for an average of $1.40 per book. I concentrated on nonfiction, but I have to admit there were whole tables I never looked at — cookbooks, architecture, and psychology come to mind. With so much to look at, I had to be ruthless in considering a book’s appeal to the rest of the bookconscious household, so I put back anything I wavered over. I also tried hard to resist books I know I can get at the library.

I found books of poems and essays, a number of science and nature books that I knew would appeal to the Teenager and Pre-teen, as well as a book on mystics, another on sacred time, one on cultural memory and another on geography. Also, a book of Gerald Durrell’s essays and a collection of early work by Jane Austen. No doubt some of these will turn up in future bookconscious posts.

When I got back and unpacked my bags of treasure, the whole family gathered on the screened porch to see what I’d found. None of them think I’m crazy for spending a lovely Saturday lugging bags of books around a gym, bless them. And I’ve noticed them “grazing” on new books I’ve left on end tables to catch someone’s interest. The teenager even thanked me for finding him a new book on the universe, and the Computer Scientist grilled supper so I could focus on blogging. What a great day in paradise!

Quick aside: I carried my books around in two tote bags, one of which was a felted bag my friend Tricia made. You can check out her hand knit items and handspun wool at her etsy shop.

The final event in my April in paradise was Book Club Evening at Gibson’s. Wine, delicious appetizers from Concord Cooperative Market, fantastic desserts from Bread and Chocolate, and three publishing reps (Ron Koltnow and Lesley Vasilio of Random House and Ann Wachur, with Penguin) who each talked up about a dozen titles newly out in paperback. They even gave out book party favors (including advance reading copies) and raffled off tote bags. I sat between my next door neighbor and a fellow Songweaver. There’s good company in paradise.

I didn’t win any raffle items, but I can report that the food was delicious, and I noted a number of books for my “to read” list. Koltnow, Vasilio, and Wachur each talked about books they love, and as we visited around the store, lots of people were chatting up their favorite reads as well. I managed to limit myself to one purchase, Olive Kitteridge, which Gibson’s book club is discussing in June.

I was tempted to buy a memoir that sounds very interesting, Twenty Chickens for a Saddle, but I resisted, in part because I’ve got 36 new-to-me books from the sale. I will probably give in to temptation and go back and get it, eventually! Unless some other member of the bookconscious household is reading this and would like to know what to give his or her mother for Mothers’ Day . . . tell Dad Gibson’s gives 30% off to anyone parked in the garage — just show your ticket!

There are only two more days left in April, and I still haven’t written about the books I’ve read this month. Stay tuned for the next bookconscious post, which I’ll try to publish next week, for a peek at what we’ve been reading around here, in between fabulous literary events. And if you’re free next April, I recommend your spend your spring break here in paradise.

April in paradise, part II: Dogs’ Night Out and Writers’ Day

After the reading at Gibson’s, I was primed for another evening of extraordinary poetry, an event I mentioned in last month’s bookconscious post — Dog’s Night Out. Mike Pride, the retired Concord Monitor editor and a poetry lover, organized this event and wrote about the three poets who graced the stage: Philip Schultz, Wesley McNair, and Sharon Olds.  You read that right — three blockbuster poets. Last year’s reading, Poets Three, featured Maxine Kumin, Donald Hall, and Charles Simic. Paradise, I am telling you, is right here in the Granite State.

The Computer Scientist and I decided to attend Dogs’ Night Out on a date, sans kids. We had a wonderful time. Concord is a small city, and you tend to see people you know whenever you go out. I ran into several fellow Songweavers (singing, one could argue, is musical poetry), a handful of Concord Reads pals, and other book-minded folks as we waited for the doors to open.

The Computer Scientist is a logistical and spatial genius, and he figured out the optimal spot for a height challenged person (me) to see the stage.  He is also a kind husband who is unembarrassed that his poetry geek wife had a notebook on her lap and took copious notes during the reading. As we settled into our seats we took in the art gracing the stage — a number of large wire sculptures of dogs.

Mike Pride opened the evening by explaining that the sculptures are the work of Monica Banks, who is married to Philip Schultz, and that he had first seen one of her dog pieces at an exhibition at the Fells here in New Hampshire in 2007.  When he met Schultz at the Pulitzer prize dinner last year, and invited him to read here, the theme of the evening — Dogs’ Night Out — took shape in Pride’s mind, because of Banks’ sculpture and several poems in Schultz’s Pulitzer prize winning book, failure.

Pride introduced Wesley McNair first, who I had the privilege to meet and speak with at the 2008 NH Writers’ Project Writers’ Day (quick aside: I also said hello after Dogs’ Night Out, thanked him for some advice he offered while signing a book for me last year, and introduced the Computer Scientist. McNair was warm and encouraging — what a joy, to talk with a gifted person who is so down to earth, and so willing to share his time with fans and students). Pride also pointed out that just as with the Poets Three reading, he asked each poet to read one poem by one of the others, and that each poet would be reading something about dogs, in keeping with the theme.

McNair opened with one of his own poems, “The One Who Will Save You,” which is a superb narrative piece set in central Maine, featuring a large mongrel dog. Next he read Sharon Olds’ “First Thanksgiving,” a lovely poem about anticipating a child’s return from college. McNair went on to say he became a poet to “talk about a broken family in a broken world,” and explained that his first poem was one word: “Wanted,” which he wrote beneath a picture he drew of his father. Then he read “How I Became a Poet,” which describes this first effort to create meaning, to transform ordinary experience with words.

McNair read other personal and family poems, including “The Good Boy Suit,” “The Book of A,” and “As I Am,” a poem that perfectly describes the state of absorbed distraction my family frequently notes in me. I sometimes worry that this is evidence of my lack of mindfulness, but McNair’s poem helped me see it as a different sort of mindfulness, in which one is present in that open space between the inner and outer worlds that Diana Durham mentioned in her talk at the Kalevala conference.

McNair also read a number of what I think of as his observational poems, such as “Smoking,” “Hymn to the Comb-Over,” and “An Executive’s Afterlife,” which he wrote years ago about an executive in hell. A timely topic, perhaps. These are not just poems, but cultural sketches, art work that is utterly accessible, that fit McNair’s own stated goal of writing “poems for the back pockets of Americans.” He closed with “It,” a poem that pokes fun at the way most of us are linguistically unspecific in our everyday speech.

Next Mike Pride introduced Sharon Olds. Through his introductions, it was clear that these poets came together to read because Pride is their common denominator — and McNair called attention to the fact that Pride is a wonderful advocate for the arts, and especially poetry, and his Monitor pieces bring poetry to a wide audience. He met McNair many years ago, and met Philip Schultz at the Pulitzer dinner. Pride drives Donald Hall to Harvard every year where he gives a talk with another poet, and one year that was Sharon Olds. In talking with her, they learned she was living in New Hampshire. Paradise, that is.

Olds opened with three poems by other poets: “The Garden,” by Schultz; and then two poems with dogs in them, “Dog Biscuits,” by Chase Twichell; and “Love,” by Ethan Stebbins. Then Olds began to read her own poems, opening with the delightful “Diagnosis,” a poem both humorous and profound in this age of experts. She continued with two other family poems, “High School Senior,” and “The Last Evening,” about being with her dying mother.

Reading poems set along the spectrum of female life, from babyhood to the death bed, Olds showed her evocative power. With a few words she conjures the enormity of human emotions, and sometimes probes the tender places nearly to the point of pain. If you’re a child or a parent, read Sharon Olds and you’ll shiver with recognition.

Olds also read “April, New Hampshire,” which is the most devastatingly beautiful funeral poem I’ve ever heard, and also a poignant tribute to Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall, and “Ode to a Composting Toilet,” which is hilarious, but like her other work, more philosophical than you might think if you just glance the surface. The poem set at Kenyon’s funeral also mentioned Hall’s dog. As we drove home later, the Computer Scientist remarked that her description of Hall looking eagle-like was eerie, and also really accurate.

Last, Pride introduced Philip Schultz, who opened with Wesley McNair’s “The Man He Turned Into,” praising McNair for the vulnerability in his poems — a characteristic of Schultz’s own work.  He went on to read the opening poem from failure, “It’s Sunday Morning in Early November,”  and other poems featuring his family, including “The Magic Kingdom,” a mindful poem about gratitude, and “My Dog,” a sad and wise pet elegy, as well as several parts of his long 9/11 poem from failure, “The Wandering Wingless,” whose protagonist is a dog walker. Schultz closed with two newer poems, “The Sweet Under Taste,” and “The God of Loneliness,” which the Computer Scientist said perfectly evokes being a dad.

I’d say the reading had a deeper theme than dogs, and these poets have more in common than knowing Mike Pride and being some of the greatest poets writing in America today.  McNair, Olds, and Schultz take the power of raw human emotions — straight out of everyday ordinary experiences like loving your partner, child, or parent, making your way in the world, doing work, or noticing what’s going on around you –  and hone those emotions and experiences into works of art. These are poems of the real world, poems with dirt and sweat and fear and pain, and yes, shit, in them. And they’re dead gorgeous, often witty, and incredibly wise.

I went to bed that night on a poetry high, only to wake up early to go to Writers’ Day, the spring conference of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project. If you write in NH and you don’t belong, join. The NH Writer newsletter, edited by Martha Carlson-Bradley, is excellent, and the events NHWP puts on are always well done. I signed up early for Writers’ Day, both to take advantage of the early bird price, and to get into my first choice workshops. I ran into a friend who said even though she registered early bird, many of her top choices were full.

This year’s keynote speaker was Meredith Hall, author of Without A Map. Her talk was inspiring, because her wildly successful writing career didn’t blossom until she was in her fifties. After a series of setbacks earlier in her life, Hall won a $50,000 grant, wrote a moving memoir (which she says came out as is — no revision needed!), watched it become a best seller, and heard from scores of people who wrote to tell her she’d changed their lives. It was hard to make any kind of practical take home notes for myself from this remarkable story. Hall herself admits her sudden success has been beyond her wildest expectations. The excerpts she read from Without a Map were lovely. I’ve put it on the long term “to read” list.

My first workshop session was “Writing In Open Forms,”  led by Jeff Friedman. We did two exercises, one on writing a poem about a color using all of the senses except vision, and the other on alliteration.  Despite having close to thirty people in the workshop, Friedman was able to have everyone read one of the two poems. He made some kind of positive comment about every piece, which is always nice in a one-off workshop where you don’t know any of your fellow poets and it’s excruciating to read a completely unpolished piece. He also gave us another exercise to do at home, which is a great way to end a workshop, with people eager to go out and keep writing.

“Mining Memory,” with Joseph Hurka, was my second session. Hurka writes fiction and memoir, and his books are on my “to read” list as well. I like to wait until after I’ve had a workshop with someone before I read their work, so I don’t form too many preconceived notions. Hurka talked about his belief that we all have profound stories in us, and that writers just need to work at figuring out the way to tell our own stories uniquely. He also talked about focusing on writing, not on what *may* happen later — publication, reviews, renown, fame. A grounding and important message.

Like Friedman, Hurka had us write a couple of exercises in the workshop, and left us with more to take home. I ended up with some interesting raw material for a project I’ve got in mind to combine poems and prose in a hybrid memoir. The exercises were short but really generated a burst of writing — people all around me cranked out a couple of pages in the brief time allotted. Hurka’s practical advice about what to do with these “mined memories” in terms of creating stories was helpful as well.

At my lunch break, I sat down at a table where I didn’t recognize anyone except Jeff Friedman. We talked a bit more about the poetry workshop. Several people at the table were talking about MFA’s, and I nearly felt brave enough to bring up my “independent MFA,” but then chickened out. After all, I was in their territory — most of the people at my table had MFA’s or taught in MFA programs. I spent the rest of the break networking, making sure I chatted with people I’d met at the Kalevala conference, readings, or other events. I also bought Friedman’s Taking Down the Angel, asked him to sign it.

My afternoon session was the most intriguing of the day. The exercises in the earlier sessions exceeded my expectations, and both Friedman and Hurka gave practical, helpful, encouraging writing advice. But this last session, “Getting Abroad,’ with Jim Kates, was a chance for me to try something entirely new and thought-provoking: literary translation.  I expected to just get an overview, but we actually tried it, and I’m hooked.

Kates, who is president of the American Literary Translators Association,  is clearly passionate about literary translation and that really made the workshop fun — his joy in this work was palpable. After reading some examples, and talking about the problems and issues literary translators face and what sets their work apart from literal translation, we split into two groups, one to work on a prose poem, and one to work on verse. My group had the verse, and the four of us each took a stanza of Rene Villard’s “Le Cemetiere De Saint-Nic.” Everyone in my group had at least a passing knowledge of French, but to make our work easier, Kates gave us a literal translation as well as the original French.

Literary translation brings together so many of my interests — reading, writing, the universality of human experience, the joy of discovering what’s unique in different cultures, the deep meaning of art, the creation of connections, knowing oneself and the world, relating one thing to another, contacting the space between the inner and outer worlds — it’s all there. Taking this workshop, with such an enthusiastic and accomplished person leading the way, was a fantastic finish to a couple of really intense weeks of thinking about writing.

I hung around for NH Literary Idol, which was a fun conclusion to the day, and went home full of thoughts and ideas. I had a great week of writing, and made a point of following up with some of the people I saw at the conference, which was one of my goals — to work on networking. All week, I also looked forward to the next book related event of the month, held last weekend: The Five Colleges Book Sale.

If you love buying books, check out the next post. The Five Colleges Book Sale is definitely a shopping paradise!

April in paradise

Maybe when you picture paradise, it’s someplace warm enough to sustain palm trees, or to support a brisk business in cocktail umbrellas.  I picture barely leafed out trees, mud studded with boot prints, boulders baring their lichen patched shoulders to the sun after months of snow cover.  In New Hampshire, April may or may not mean pleasant weather, but it does mean the rich literary landscape of my adopted home awakens as towns come alive with events celebrating poetry, libraries, and books.  I was able to get to two conferences, two poetry readings, an enormous book sale, and a book club publishers’ preview, so I thought I’d give bookconscious readers a taste of my April in paradise.

A few weekends ago, I spent a Saturday reveling in the mysteries of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic poem. This fascinating program, put on by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire, caught my eye for two reasons. First, I had been trying to figure out what to do for a day long “artist’s date” for The Artists’ Way, and second, the Kalevala conference was free, thanks to sponsors and a grant from The NH Humanities Council.

The conference took place at an inn in Rochester, NH, near the seacoast. Driving over, I considered what I already knew about the Kalevala: it grew out of folk poetry and stories, which Elias Lonnrot compiled into an epic during a time of emerging Finnish cultural awareness after Finland gained independence in the first half of the 19th century. This much I knew from learning about Finland last year with my kids. From the pre-conference emails outlining the talks, I knew that the epic influenced Tolkien. That was about it.

The morning opened with a talk on Tolkien and the fantasy genre. Much of this material was familiar to me, having studied fantasy and mythology before I wrote a novel for young people (as yet unpublished), The Last Unicorns of Georgia. Quick aside to any editors reading this: it’s a middle grade novel about a New England girl whose family moves to the Deep South, where she finds that a small group of unicorns are living in the dense woods behind her house. At the urging of the unicorns’ matriarch, she uncovers a plot to harvest unicorn horns for use as a masking agent for athletes’ performance enhancing drugs.

My novel isn’t purely fantasy — it’s more of an eco-mystery which happens to hinge on unicorn mythology, but as I prepared to write it, I read several great fantasy books aloud with my kids, and I also read fantasy theory, such as Ursula LeGuin’s The Language of the Night, some of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, and a number of essays in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. I read about Tolkien, but I admit that although the Computer Scientist and the Teenager have both read his books, I haven’t (they are on my long term “to read” list).

Besides Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy — which bookconscious fans know the Teenager claims are so good they have made it impossible for him to find other books that hold up to the Tolkien standard of storytelling — some of our family favorites are the Harry Potter series, the Narnia books, Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence, The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander, Half Magic and other titles by Edward Eager, and the Eragon cycle.

So the talk on fantasy was appealing to me, if not exactly unknown territory.  The speaker, Clia Goodwin, gave a good presentation on “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Uses of Fantasy,” but didn’t add much about the Kalevala, except to say that Tolkien read the epic as a young man, Finnish was one of many languages he learned, and there is evidence he was influenced by the poem.  That said, Goodwin’s talk was very interesting, and later speakers built a bit on what she said about Tolkien’s views on the cultural rewards of fantasy — recovery, escape, and consolation  –  in terms of explaining the role of epic poetry and the Kalevala specifically in Finnish culture.

The next speaker, Diana Durham, is a poet as well as an Arthurian legend specialist who has written about the grail myth as a path to our inner selves. She gave an intriguing talk on “The Poet as Shaman.”  Durham opened with her thoughts on what poetry and mythology share — a reliance on symbolism to transform not only words, but the way the reader experiences words, and assimilates that experience into personal meaning or even healing. As an example, she read “Postscript,” by Seamus Heaney.

The rest of  her talk focused on the grail myth and how story, song, and poetry draw people out of their ordinary lives into the place where inner and outer worlds connect. She used Bernard Chandler’s photograph of the chalice well cover in Glastonbury as a visual metaphor for this idea, and referred to T.S. Eliot’s poetry, which happens to be what we’re reading for our book discussion with the Teenager this month. Like Goodwin, Durham spoke only peripherally about the Kalevala, but her presentation was fascinating. I am still thinking through her ideas on the way poetry and myth make meaning that transcends time and place.

Much of my “bookconscious theory on interconnectedness” has to do with the ways that we interpret ourselves through what we read, and the work interprets us, as we interact with it. In the process, we make connections for ourselves and with other people not just in reading, but in thinking about, writing about, discussing, reading reviews, and otherwise processing what we’ve read and placing it in our own mind map of what we know, believe, and love.  How many times have you read something written in another place and time and felt as if you belonged there? I don’t think that’s coincidence. We somehow identify ourselves in writing or music or art because in some primal sense we know those creations deep in our beings.

After a break for lunch, during which I let my head swim with thoughts of interconnectedness, the Kalevala conference re-convened, and Borje Vahamaki, a professor of Finnish studies, language and literature scholar, translator, and publisher, spoke on “Language and Meaning in the Kalevala.” He is in the process of recording audio CD’s of the poem, mostly in English but with a bit of Finnish to give listeners a sense of the original. Having heard him read just an excerpt, I’d guess the CD’s are fabulous.

Vahamaki is a Kalevala expert, and his passion came through in his talk, which was a quick introduction to Finnish history and language as well as a crash course in the Kalevala itself. Dr. Vahamaki made suggestions for delving more deeply into the Kalevala, and pointed out that the epic has inspired other writers, like Longfellow, and composers, most notably Sibelius, which perfectly illustrates the ideas we’d already heard about the impact of myth and poetry, and my theories that reading creates connections we carry into the rest of our lives.

The last speaker, Sarah Cummings Ridge, is a Maine resident of Finnish descent, whose father gave her a type of Finnish folk harp called a kantele as a wedding gift. In the Kalevala, the hero makes and plays a kantele made from a pike bone. Cummings Ridge said she had no idea when she received her father’s gift that it would change her life. She now leads The Maine Kanteles, and the group played a number of songs to end the conference.

The Kalevala event was one of the many activities of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Recently the group moved their monthly readings and open mic night to one of my favorite places: Gibson’s, Concord’s independent bookstore. April’s reading featured two New Hampshire poets familiar to bookconscious readers: Martha Carlson- Bradley and Alice Fogel. I was getting over a nasty virus, but I dragged myself out to hear these two wonderful poets read. Next time I am going to stay for the open mic (and maybe even sign up to try reading myself).

I was struck again by Fogel’s amazing use of language.  I mentioned in my post last year about her book Be That Empty that she also makes clothing — Lyric Couture is her fashion company, and it’s tag is “collaged fashions from reprised goods.”  Filtering the sound of her poetry through my somewhat illness addled mind, I was struck by how similar the two arts are — poetry and the creation of fashions. In both cases Fogel is piecing together things that at first may not seem to fit:  images and words, parts of other articles of clothing. Stitched together, the final product, whether verbal or visual, is beautiful.

I hadn’t heard Carlson-Bradley read before, but I read her book Season We Can’t Resist a few months ago.  I commented then that Carlson-Bradley has an eye for fine detail, and listening to her poems as she read, I noticed her observations of nature are scientific as well as artistic. In fact, both she and Fogel mentioned science as big influences in their work. Carlson-Bradley write poems rich in sensory detail that bring the reader right into the natural world near her home here in New Hampshire. If you’re not convinced by my contention that NH is a kind of paradise, read Carlson-Bradley’s poems and you’ll see our flora and fauna rival any old tropical rain forest, at least in their literary value.

Readings are a good reminder that poetry is an oral tradition as well as a written one, and hearing Carlson-Bradley read highlighted the way she beautifully connects human nature with the physical environment we live in. Poetry is an art especially prone to creating connections, and to exploring our connection to each other, and many poets have explored the man/nature continuum. I find Carlson-Bradley’s work particularly evocative because she writes about things many of us probably pass by in cars or even on paths in the woods, without noticing them or reflecting on their — and our — place in the world.

Check out “April In Paradise, Part II,” which I’ll post in the next couple of days, to hear about the rest of this amazing literary month.

Mindful march moments

March flew past. I meant to savor it, mindfully. Instead, I’ll have to be satisfied that I had some mindful moments and keep practicing. Mindfulness is a way of being aware in the present — hard if you are someone who multitasks, and hard in our culture, that values being busy.

For me being mindful also means being aware of the connections between what I’m thinking, doing, or reading and all that has come before and will come after. It’s probably no surprise to those of you who’ve read my monthly musings here that I equate mindfulness with finding  interconnectedness.

That may not be “real” mindfulness, but it works for me, because one of the my goals in practicing mindfulness is perspective — awareness of what one of my favorite prayers in the Book of Common Prayer calls “the changes and chances of this life.”  Mindfulness for me is about being more fully present with the people and experiences I’m having, not racing ahead in my mind to the next ten things I need to do. At the same time, mindfulness, and other meditation practices, remind me to rest in God’s “eternal changelessness.” (from the same prayer in BCP).

Two books I read this month inspired me to work on mindfulness in my writing and in life. Patricia Donegan’s Haiku Mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness and Open Your Heart reminded me of all the reasons I love haiku. Really good haiku is not necessarily the 5-7-5 poem you learned about in elementary school (some good haiku use this form, but the majority don’t). An excellent haiku is a little “aha” moment — a glimpse into the poet’s mindfulness, because writing great haiku requires the poet to distill a moment of awareness into a few words.

Donegan adds annotations to each poem in this collection, which includes work by both classic and contemporary poets. Her own background as a poet and scholar, as well as a student of meditation and a colleague of Allen Ginsberg at Naropa Institute, inform her insightful commentary.

This isn’t straight up literary criticism — while Donegan calls attention to each poem’s beauty, her criteria for including poems in this collection had as much to do with content as craft, as the subtitle indicates. In fact, I was interested in reading the book not only because I love haiku, but also because I want to “cultivate awareness and open (my) heart.”

One reason I am on a quest towards mindfulness is that I see it as a crucial part of being a good parent. To that end, I’d been meaning to read Jon and Maya Kabat-Zinn’s book, Everyday Blessings:The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting. Over the years I have read a large number of books on being a parent.

The Computer Scientist likes to tell people that when we brought our older child home from the hospital, he hid the books on top of a tall bookcase so that I would relax and rest with the new baby. Our children howl with laughter when we describe administering our son’s first bath: I read the directions, step by step, from a parenting manual, and the Computer Scientist followed them.

Everyday Blessings is not a prescriptive manual, and you won’t get step by step advice from the authors. But it is an important guide, and one of the most honest parenting books I’ve come across. Rather than setting up perfect parenting examples and talking about the wonderful experiences the authors have had in applying their stellar techniques, the Kabat-Zinns provide hope and encouragement but also tell it like it is: parenting is not easy, kids are not always easy to live with, and you’re going to lose it at some point.

But mindfulness can offer perspective, can help people through challenges, and can foster peace when emotional storms have passed. The Kabat-Zinns open their home to readers and share their own parenting experiences, but they also don’t claim to have all the answers, and frequently let readers know that parenting is a judgement call, and it’s alright to not always know what to do.

As a mother of a preteen and teen, I found that comforting. When I was younger and wanted “how to” information I might not have appreciated it as much. I found myself sharing bits of this book with the Computer Scientist and also with the kids. One thing I shared with them is that the Kabat-Zinns quote T.S. Eliot’s “The Four Quartets” several times in Everyday Blessings. This impressed the Teenager — you’ll find out why later in this essay. I was fascinated to connect Eliot’s poetry with mindfulness.

Everyday Blessings points out that being mindful in relationships is enormously helpful — it may not be the key to determining how to handle every parenting challenge, but it will help you to know whether there really is a challenge. So often there isn’t; one or the other person is simply overwhelmed by emotions — in our house we call it “reacting to stimuli.”  Being aware of what is happening, rather than half paying attention while doing three other tasks, can make a huge difference in accepting, understanding, and responding fully.

A novella I read this month addresses the full horror of humans not taking the time to be aware and accepting of each other: Blonde Roots by Bernadine Evaristo.  It’s a book about slavery and colonialism, but it reverses history, and makes Europeans slaves of African overlords. An interesting concept, realized in a fast paced story.

Racism is racism, no matter who perpetrates it. Slavery was barbaric. None of this is new, but Evaristo’s twisted history forces readers to consider man’s inhumanity to man in a fresh way. It was an interesting read, with a page turning plot.

As I mentioned in last month’s post, reading a novel set in South Africa inspired me to pick up Power Lines: Two Years on South Africa’s Borders, by Jason Carter, about his time in the Peace Corps. He lived there during the end of Nelson Mandela’s presidency. As President Carter’s grandson, he got to meet Mandela, and he writes about what a phenomenal experience that was. During the rest of his tour, he worked in a small town near the Swaziland border.

Power Lines is not just a book about Carter’s time volunteering, although he does explain the frustrations and challenges of Peace Corps work. Because he lived in South Africa at such a seminal moment, as the country began to recover from apartheid and enter a new democratic era, he also tells readers about the history of the area where he worked, the changes taking place, and the racial attitudes he encountered.

As a person who spent five years as an outsider in a small southern town, I felt that much of what he wrote about was eerily familiar. Because I grew up fairly insulated from the civil rights era struggles, I was surprised by the ongoing misunderstanding and mistrust between blacks and whites in the small town where we lived. I had the ignorant impression, before we lived in the south, that race issues were a thing of the past in America.

One thing that I was unaware of, naive as it may sound, is that racial mistrust goes both ways — and even within races. Carter really describes vividly the ways that people judging each other, rather than seeking to know each other as individuals, hurts communication and understanding. Of course, this goes on wherever humans, of any race or culture, are together.

In Power Lines, Carter touches on the very thing my family and I learned: economic discrimination and stereotyping is a major factor in racism.  Lack of educational resources and jobs meant that some of the South Africans he met had less hope about the future than others, and that in turn often influenced their attitudes about race. Some of the whites he met were able to make friends with other city dwelling, professional people of either race, but routinely he met whites who were afraid of poorer blacks, and cautioned him against riding in black taxis or hitchhiking.

He also found it frustrating that many of the educators he worked with routinely told him that they couldn’t do something because they were black, or asked his advice in areas that were well beyond his expertise, simply because as a white man, they believed he knew better than they did. Around the time Barack Obama declared his presidential candidacy, a fellow librarian in the southern town where we were living told me that several African American women on the library staff believed that Obama must be a foreigner because of the way he spoke. I suspect that racial stereotypes will be around for a very long time in South Africa, as they are here.

Carter’s book was also intriguing because he openly doubts his own idealistic views and the value of his work, which I think is realistic.  Anyone who spends significant time volunteering is likely to have his or her idealism crushed by the system at one point or another. The only other Peace Corps memoir I’ve read, Dear Exile, by Hilary Liftin and Kate Montgomery, also addressed disillusionment.

I’ve experienced it myself, when I found that many of my fellow volunteers at an ecumenical food pantry mistrusted the clients and were more concerned with The Rules than with ending hunger. And when I realized the obvious: that food handouts probably have little to do with solving the problem of hunger. Hard to swallow, because I wanted to be Making a Difference. Turns out I was having a Thoreauvian epiphany, I just didn’t know it yet. Hang on, we’ll get to that.

Straight talk about doubts and fears makes Power Lines an interesting read, one that could foster discussions about the of the pros and cons of volunteer programs. Carter also shares the few negative experiences he had, and the societal problems he saw, such as alcoholism and organized crime. At the same time it’s clear he loved the people he came to know, he loved what he was doing, and he did make a difference. I’m glad he didn’t leave out the challenges and struggles.

Carter’s  honest appraisal made the book vivid and informative, and timely as our government talks about ramping up American volunteerism.  The book reinforced my belief that the experience of living in another culture, making friends, and trying to understand the world and one’s place in it, is life changing not only for the people volunteers meet and work with, but also for the volunteers themselves. Person to person understanding is valuable regardless of how well the actual work of a volunteering mission goes.

Last night I sat down to read a bit of Walden — more on why in a moment — and in the way it so often does, what I read connected to my prior reading. Just as I had been reflecting that Jason Carter’s examination of the motive, purpose, and impact of the work he is in South Africa to do are the most thought provoking passages in Power Lines, I discovered that Thoreau covers this same territory in Walden.

Thoreau writes that rather than doing good, people should focus on being good, and that instead of throwing money at the poor, philanthropists would be better off solving the societal problems that cause poverty: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”

In other words, handing out food at the food pantry isn’t going to end hunger. Working to help people be self reliant so that they can feed themselves, might. Living your own life so that your actions aren’t making someone else hungry (even if that’s not what you intend), is probably the best option.

As my family and I have learned about social justice and been involved with nonprofits (the Computer Scientist worked for a large international NGO while we lived in the South), we’ve spent time debating this very idea, of how best to make a difference. We tend to support the work of nonprofits like Heifer International and Habitat for Humanity, which help people change their own lives. My 95 year old grandmother has always told me she thinks handouts are no good because they take away a person’s dignity — a legacy of living through the Great Depression. Habitat’s motto is “a hand up, not a hand out.”

The private development world has moved in this direction, towards sustainable aid, local control of projects, microlending, and partnership. But recent discussions of development, and particuarly government aid, on public radio programs Speaking of Faith and Word of Mouth would sound familiar to Thoreau, and many developing world economists and writers are saying much the same thing that he did: attack the root, not the branches, and above all, don’t throw money at the tree.

I started reading Walden last year, when the kids and I were learning about the famous 19th century residents of Concord, Massachusetts.  I picked it up again, along with The Flowering of New England: 1815-1865 by Van Wyck Brooks, because a couple of weekends ago we finally visited Concord, so I’ve set aside some other “to read” books and am revisiting Concord’s literary heritage.

We walked around Walden Pond to the site of Thoreau’s cabin. We also saw the homes where the Alcotts, Hawthornes, and Emersons lived. At the Concord Museum, which is well worth a visit if you are interested in the town’s famous residents, the Computer Scientist and I each found some really cool books for planning future outings: R. Todd Felton’s A Journey Into Transcendentalist New England and Susan Wilson’s The Literary Trail of Greater Boston. So far I’ve only dipped into each of these, but they are both beautiful and fascinating.

Museum bookshops are one of my favorite places to browse, and a few weeks ago we visited an entire museum exhibit devoted to the work of a man whose books are often found in museum shops: David Macaulay. The exhibit features the drawings and paintings he’s done as he’s illustrated books as well as models he built for Mosque, journals from some of the research trips he’s done, and the books themselves.

The Computer Scientist thought Underground was really cool, and I chose Angelo for our nieces and nephew, who are visiting at Easter. The Teenager and his younger sister liked seeing the art from The New The Way Things Work, and we were inspired to check out several Macaulay titles from the library after the museum visit, including a couple of really innovative picture books, Shortcut and Black and White.

Another book that multiple family members enjoyed recently is How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer. Both the Computer Scientist and the Teenager think this is an intriguing book. Foer delves into the sociopolitical lessons of soccer, which he says is  “further along in the globalization game than any other economy on the planet.”

Our book discussion group with the Teenager is chugging along. So far we’ve read, discussed, and journaled about The Old Man and the Sea, The Great Gatsby, and Of Mice and Men. Our focus is 20th century American authors.  Not the most uplifting bunch of stories, so far, but the Teenager seems to find validation for his own angsty outlook. For example, he commented that Steinbeck doesn’t appear to believe that it’s worth having a dream, based on the fact that the characters who dream of better lives are all thwarted in Of Mice and Men.

If you look at the current events he’s known so far, you might understand why he just shrugged and said, “but that’s life.” I tried being mindful, and told him I thought we actually have it pretty good, really. He’s not really as pessimistic as he’d like people to think, and acknowledged that I’m right, just before asking cheerfully what’s for dinner. It’s good to be young. So far it’s not that bad being middle aged, either. And it’s interesting having a teenager’s perspective on books, and life.

I put up a poster for National Poetry Month last week and the Teenager did a double take. “Who wrote that?” he asked. “That’s really powerful.” I immediately tracked down two copies of The Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot. Granted, he’s usually grouped with 20th century English writers, but he was born American, so that’s what we’ll read next for our book group. I felt like Eliot was calling to me — first in Everyday Blessings, where I enjoyed the references to “The Four Quartets,” then in my son’s immediate, forceful reaction to the poster.

Eliot came up at an event I attended last weekend — a one day conference on the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, put on by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. One of the speakers, Diana Durham, has written a book on the grail myth, and her presentation at the conference, “The Poet As Shaman,” included a discussion of the way Eliot conjures up the spiritual desolation of 1920’s London in “The Wasteland,” but then heals the wounds, twenty years later, in the completed “Four Quartets.” Her talk was very interesting, and reinforced my Theory of the Interconnectedness of Reading.

Another author whose work fit nicely into everything else I read this month is Mary Oliver. I was at Ohrstrom library checking out books by Dorianne Laux, who I’ve heard is coming to the campus. On their new book shelves, I saw The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays.

Oliver is a master of mindful awareness of her surroundings, and her poems are haiku-like not in their form, but in their immediacy, their descriptive power, and the way they capture the extraordinary in everyday experience. I also find her poems transformative — you can so clearly see what she sees that it’s easy to feel what she feels, too. This collection is mostly made up of previously published poems, all relating to animals, and in many cases, our connection to the natural world.

A final note on connections. The Pre-teen is reading a book I picked up on a book store sale table a few years ago, We Just Want To Live Here: A Palestinian Teenager, An Israeli Teenager — an Unlikely Friendship. It’s the true story of Odelia and Amal, girls who meet on a trip designed to bring Israeli and Palenstinian teens together to learn about each other’s lives. They become friends and stay in touch. Through their letters, readers get an idea of the huge gulf in understanding the girls try to overcome.

I enjoyed this book when I bought it, and the Pre-teen likes reading about girls in other countries. I attended a very moving talk given by two members of Combatants for Peace last month, and shared what I heard about person to person peace efforts in the Middle East, so maybe that is what led her to choose this now. When she browsed our shelves and came across We Just Want To Live Here, I knew that even if it means having to stack books on the floor someday, I’ll resist weeding — you never know when a book will be right for someone, and I love sharing reading connections with my family.

In my “to read” pile if I finish Walden and The Flowering of New England in April? I watched a re-run of Masterpiece Theater’s David Copperfield and decided I’d like to read the book (which was waiting on my shelves), and I’ve pulled out an old Powell’s Books  find called Beyond the Sky and the Earth: Journey Into Bhutan, because I am volunteering with refugee resettlement, and the family I’m helping welcome are Bhutanese. They’ve lived in a camp in Nepal for 18 years — so what I read about Bhutan will be clouded by what I know of their experience. But I’m curious nonetheless.

I also bought a copy of Krista Tippett’s Speaking of Faith, which she signed, when I went to hear her interviewed by NHPR’s Virginia Prescott last week. I’ve read it before, but Ive left it out to dip back into. I’ve been slowly reading The Making of a Sonnet, a Norton anthology, and I’m up to the 19th century (perfect as I read about the same time period in New England’s literary scene). And of course, I’ll be reading T. S. Eliot with the Computer Scientist and the Teenager.

I also plan to read poems by three amazing poets who are coming together for a reading next week. Mike Pride, retired editor of the Concord Monitor and a poetry fan, sent me a note this afternoon because he saw my bookconscious post on last year’s fantastic Poets’ Three reading.

Mike says, “Dogs’ Night Out: Three Great Poets, will be held next Friday (April 17, 2009) at the Concord City Auditorium. The poets are Wesley McNair, Sharon Olds and 2008 Pulitzer prize winner Philip Schultz. They’re all terrific, accessible poets, and it should be a fun night. In tomorrow’s Monitor (April 9) and in the online Monitor, there will be profile-interviews of the three poets, along with a sample of their work.”

Tickets for Dogs’ Night Out are $10, and any proceeds above costs will go to local homeless charities. The time is 7 p.m., and tickets are available at the Monitor, at concordmonitor.com, at Gibson’s and at the box office. Thanks, Mike.  The Computer Scientist and I have our tickets, and we’ll see you there!

So I’ve got quite a pile “to read” (my kids are relieved that I no longer stack books on my nightstand — when they were younger and when we lived in tornado country, they used to fret that the stack would fall on me in the night). But no matter how many books I browse, I will read one thing at a time.  Mindfully.