Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss

I’ve read and enjoyed four other books by Sarah Moss so when I browsed Europa Editions books available on my library’s eBook app, I was excited to see Signs for Lost Children. As with her previous books, Moss examines women’s lives from the inside, exploring how her characters’ interior lives impact the sides of themselves seen by their family, friends, and neighbors. Apparently this is the second in a two book tale about the main character, Alethea (Ally) Moberly — the first, Bodies of Light, is set in her childhood; I’m not sure how I’d enjoy that given the glimpses of her childhood in this book. Ally’s sister May is also referenced in Night Waking, as a nurse Anna reads about as she researches the history of childhood. It’s interesting that Moss has traced different aspects of these characters’ lives through several books.

In Signs for Lost Children, Ally is finishing medical school in the late 1800s, a still unusual path for women at the time. She meets a lighthouse engineer, Tom Cavendish, after her cousin hears him speak at a lecture series. Tom is intrigued by this thoughtful woman and she by a man who seems to appreciate her work. Despite the fact that he has committed to a months-long expedition to Japan to consult on a lighthouse, the pair marry and move to Cornwall, where Tom works, and where Ally takes a position at an asylum.

Moss works into the story information about mental healthcare (such as it was at the time) and attitudes towards the “mad” as asylum inmates were called. The details about how Ally feels about asylum “treatment” and what she believes a better approach would be are interesting. It’s clear that much about Ally’s own upbringing causes her pain and impacts her own mental wellbeing. As the book develops, Moss shows us Ally’s growing awareness of how her own experiences have prepared her to be a good doctor, and yet also expose her to the possibility of reopening old wounds as she empathizes with her patients.

The second major thread of the book is about Tom’s experience in Japan, which is also fascinating. Japan at the time — the Meiji period — was opening up to the West and within its own society after casting off feudalism. On his journey home Tom reflects that the time when Japanese experts will be sought out in the West rather than vice versa is not far off. In his time in Japan he comes to appreciate the simplicity of homes, attire, and cooking. But it doesn’t escape his notice that women silently make all that happen and men enjoy the fruits of their labor.

The final piece of the book is a lovely examination of marriage and the strangeness of forming a new life as a couple. As in her other books Moss writes with great sensitivity about marriage, although Ally and Tom are mutually kind and supportive which is different than the marriages portrayed in some of the other books Moss has written. The night before the wedding, Tom asks if she’s looking forward to it and Ally thinks:

“Her mind stretches towards the words he asks to hear, towards the speaking of affection and desire. If she did not know better, she would say that there was a physical change in her, that her heart rests more comfortably under her breastbone for his faith. She would like to tell him that she sleeps more easily and wakes without the life-long start of dread at another day. That his importance to her is frightening. Without looking at him, she nods.”

Ally and Tom face added hurdles to establishing a life together as his prolonged absence and her professional challenges impact their early marriage. And interestingly, it’s his return that is the most challenging thing. She’s published a paper and is directing a new convalescence home, Rose Tree House, a kind of halfway house where women from the asylum who have not passed their discharge interviews but are considered potentially capable of doing so in the future live together, tending a garden and chickens, keeping the house, preparing and sharing meals, and engaging in small projects like sewing. Tom is unsettled by the change in her and in himself upon his return, and she has lost confidence in being at all loveable. They have to try more than once to start over.

It all feels very realistic, the struggle to find themselves, he a man who feels outside of things because of his life, circumstances, his solitary work, and his travels, she, who shares his sense, as her friend Annie says,of being “strangers in a strange land” because of her work and gender and because “she has always known that she doesn’t know which fork to use or what should not be said in mixed company or among ladies with their gloves on.” For Ally, Rose Tree House is the new beginning she wants, making a real difference in the lives of women no one has understood. It’s inspiring, and it’s good to read a novel where a woman’s wellbeing hinges on claiming her own space as well as making space for others.

As always, Sarah Moss provides much food for thought, wrapped up in a lovely story with many interesting threads.

I should add that I read the seventeenth Maisie Dobbs book — A Sunlit Weapon — and loved it. I don’t like to review books that are part of a series because I know as a reader I like to begin at the beginning. If you haven’t read this series, take the link and read my view of the first book in the series and go for it. It’s a delight.

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My Year of Meats by Ruth L. Ozeki

When I read A Tale for the Time Being I knew I’d want to read more of Ruth Ozeki’s work. The friends whose house I’m staying at this week happened to have My Year of Meats on their shelves, so I decided that was sign. Also, the protagonist is a documentary filmmaker, which sort of segues from the previous two books I read, which both had something to do with the contemporary art scene.  Looking at the rest of the pile of books I’ve brought I’m not sure I can keep spooling out these connections, but we’ll see.

Anyway, My Year of Meats was Ozeki’s debut novel, and it’s stunning in more ways than one. Jane, the protagonist, is a Japanese American who is hired to film a series of programs promoting American beef, called “My American Wife!” The series will feature “real” American families and their beef recipes. Jane and her Japanese crew set off across America but Jane’s documentarian streak rebels at her remit and she keeps veering slightly off course, in ways that annoy the beef promotion syndicate’s boss, Joichi Ueno (“You get it? ‘John Wayno’!” Ueno asks in a Mississippi church). For example, Jane features lesbian vegetarians from Northampton in one of her episodes.

In the course of the story, Jane hears from Ueno’s wife, Akiko, who asks her about another issue that came to light in Jane’s research: whether hormones in the meat industry are contributing to lower fertility rates. This deeply impacts Jane, as she is a DES daughter — someone whose mother was prescribed DES to prevent miscarriage. when Jane realizes she has come across a feedlot in Colorado that is using the banned hormone, she risks everything — her job, her relationship, and even her health — to get her crew in to film before Ueno can arrive from Japan to foil her plan.

The book has a second set of storylines as strong as that one. Jane’s relationship with a musician named Sloan and her own fertility issues, and Akiko’s relationship with Ueno and parallel issues. Both Jane and Akiko are fans of Shonagon and her Pillow Book, which Ozeki quotes between chapters. The women make contact, initially, via faxes, which others read with various complications. It is charming and a little strange, to think that a few short years after the time of this novel, intercepted faxes would no longer be a viable plot twist.

This is in some ways a brutal read; there are horrible domestic violence scenes and the final filming Jane and her crew do in a slaughterhouse is awful. But despite the brutality the book is about truth and is also in many ways a celebration of love, and about the strength of these to overcome ignorance and pain. It’s also a philosophical study of collective ignorance.

Ozeki writes in Jane’s voice, “. . . ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence. I would like to think of my ‘ignorance’ less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. If we can’t act on knowledge, then we can’t survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even.” This in a book written in 1998, set in 1992. Look where ignorance, and our cultural cultivation of it, has taken us.

Anyway, this isn’t a light read, but it’s a page turner. I really wanted to know what was going to happen to Jane, to Akiko, to the women in My American Wife!, to Jane’s crew and her mom and Sloan, so I tore through it. If you’re looking for a smart, challenging beach read this summer, this would be a good choice!

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Less by Andrew Sean Greer

One of my book club friends mentioned Less was what she wanted to read next and it’s on several “best” of the year lists. Which I have a long history of quibbling with — I don’t like them because I feel like people should read whatever they like, which is not necessarily what critics like, but the former Teen the Elder convinced me to to stop judging and just have fun with them. Good advice. End of digression. Anyway, it was on the shelf at my library, and I hadn’t read Andrew Sean Greer‘s work before, so I decided to give it a try.

Less refers in part to Arthur Less, the hero of the story, whose former longtime lover, Freddy, is about to get married. Less decides to avoid the wedding by accepting a series of trips — some related to his work as a writer, some for pleasure — and string them together into a months long exodus from San Francisco, where he and Freddy live. He’ll venture from California to New York to interview a more famous author, to Mexico for a conference, Italy for a prize ceremony, Germany to teach a writing class, Paris on an unexpected layover, Morocco for a 50th birthday of the friend of a friend (Less will turn 50 there, too), then India for a writing retreat and Japan to write about kaiseki meals.

Less is a writer of lesser known novels, and in New York his agent tells him that his longtime publisher has rejected the most recent one. He’s also most well known for being the former partner of a Pulitzer prize winning poet. The reader begins to realize that this status as less-than is the defining characteristic of Arthus Less. Also he’s the type of person who bumbles into minor mishaps such as not being able to get into his German apartment, speaking foreign languages badly, losing his favorite suit to a tailor’s dog, getting locked in a room when a 400 year old door is stuck, and losing his luggage. Although really, who could travel that far without a bag being misrouted? He also bumbles into more pleasant surprises, which are so delightful I won’t spoil them for you here.

All of this endears Less to readers and to his friends. His story resonated with me in a way because I too faced that milestone birthday this year, and the wistfulness it can incite. My life hasn’t been as colorful or accomplished as Less’s but I get the feelings. Greer’s writing is beautiful and original without being overdone in that “look at me, I’m writing unconventional fiction” way that can be annoying. While the narrative is linear with a lot of passages looking back at earlier times in Less’s life, the narrator asserts himself as someone who knows Less, rather than as an impersonal third party, a little like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. But the narrator also turns out to be a character described in the third person throughout the novel as well, which is fun.

The language is fun too — describing Less trying a new outfit in Paris boutique, Greer writes, “He looks like a Fire Island supervillain rapper.”  There’s a wonderful passage where Less loses the “wedding” ring his famous author partner gave him (pre-marriage equality) in a bin of mushrooms and a group of other men think he’s going to be in trouble with his wife and try to help him find it. In Japan he sees “tourist buses parked in a row along the river their great side mirrors like the horns of caterpillars” from a rental car that “basically feels like an enameled toaster.” All the details of his travels are also delightful.

Less seems like a sad book, or at least a melancholy one, at first. But as you journey with Less things begin to look up and the ending is just lovely. It’s a book about a flawed human bumbling along but mostly doing fine. And even being happy here and there. A good read.

 

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Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Lest you think all of my reading lately has come from The Readers podcast — see my previous post. But yes, this is another that Simon and Thomas discussed and Simon said he hoped to read by the end of the year. Since the plan is that I start an MSc in Science Communication at University of Edinburgh (don’t get excited, it’s a distance learning course) in September, I figure my reading for pleasure year is almost over. Pachinko is a big thick historical novel, so when I saw it on the “recently returned” shelf a few days after I heard that podcast, I thought, “no time like the present.”

Min Jin Lee is about my age and writes in her author note that this novel has been with her for thirty years — she had the idea in college, when she heard a guest speaker talk about Koreans living in Japan more or less stateless  because of WWII and the Korean War. Pachinko was informed by that story, and is the tale of Sunja, daughter of a poor widow who runs a boarding house in Yeongdo near Busan in what is today South Korea. Sunja is beloved, but uneducated. In her innocence and ignorance she is taken advantage of by a wealthy Korean man who lives primarily in Osaka but visits Yeongdo on business. Isak, a well born Korean man who is on his way to be a Presbyterian minister in Osaka, convalesces from tuberculosis at the boarding house and feels moved to help Sunja.

From there the story traces Sunja’s life and that of her family, in particular her two sons Mozasu and Noa, to 1989. It’s about the Koreans who were caught between warring nations, immigrants even if they were born in Japan like Sunja’s children and grandchildren, required to register as aliens even though they have not known any other country. It’s also about women; “A woman’s lot is to suffer,” Yangjin, Sunja’s mother, tells her and we hear that repeated over the decades. Sunja and her sister-in-law Kyunghee must do what their husbands tell them to, and yet when war devastates the family it is these two who support and sustain the family. And it’s about love, especially first love, which impacts several characters, and maternal love, a sacrificial love so strong that Sunja worries it is idolatrous.

Lee suffuses her novel with sensual details — the way cloth feels, the smell and taste of food, the sounds and smells of various neighborhoods, vivid details about the way characters look. All of this drew me further into the stories of the characters’ lives. My only disappointment was that a subplot about some minor characters, Mozasu’s best friend Haruki and his wife Ayame, sort of trailed off with no resolution. Otherwise this was an enjoyable read, and one that took me to a place and time I hadn’t explored before.

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A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

This amazing novel, recommended by a friend, is about an author named Ruth who lives on an island off the west coast of Canada with her husband, Oliver. Ruth Ozeki, the author of this amazing novel, is an author named Ruth who lives on an island off the west coast of Canada with her husband, Oliver. Trippy? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

The book opens with a diary entry: “Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you. A time being  is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is or was, or ever will be.”

We soon learn that Nao is a teenager in Japan, and that her diary washed up on the beach near Ruth’s and Oliver’s home, in a plastic bag, wrapped up with a watch, a parcel of letters, and another diary, written in French. As the novel unfolds, we learn about Ruth’s life and Nao’s. It’s a tough read, full of deeply important questions of human decency, purpose, belief, and meaning. Ozeki touches on an array of subjects as she tells her story —  First Peoples mythology, botany & ecology, meteorology & geography, Western philosophy, Zen Buddhism, quantum physics, computing and technology, consumerism, contemporary education, pop culture, and the relationship between people and cats, to name several.

Nao is terribly unhappy, but her father introduces her to her great-grandmother, who is 104 and lives at a temple where she is a Buddhist nun. From the start, Ruth is concerned about Nao’s well being, not only because she is troubled, but also because the diary appears on the beach after the 2011 Tsunami. Ruth wonders if Nao and her family are still alive. She becomes so wrapped up in determining what became of them that her own work suffers. Her interest teeters on obsession and possibly even madness, when she swears that Nao’s diary is missing words. Separately, she pursues tracking down Nao and her father, and finds out just enough to leave readers intrigued to the last pages.

Oliver, is sort of a modern Renaissance man, part artist, part scientist, part philosopher, and fully capable of wrestling the tricky generator they rely on when storms ravage the island, digging clams and oysters, and chopping firewood. He’s also Ruth’s counterbalance, a partner who supports her curiosity but also challenges it at times. The rest of the island gets involved too, once word gets out about their find. Much of what is in the two diaries is had to read — Ozeki captures man’s inhumanity to man pretty vividly. But it’s worth reading because A Tale for the Time Being is both a good story with a mystery at its heart and an incredible amalgamation of Eastern and Western culture and ideas. It’s a trip, full of heart, and a good read, and did I mention?  There’s a cat (and Schrödinger’s cat as well).

 

 

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The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund De Waal

I’ve had this book on my “to-read” list for over a year, and finally read it for Gibson’s Book Club. I’m very glad I did. The hare in the title is a netsuke, a small Japanese carving that attached to the end of a cord on a small pouch that men hung on their kimono sashes to serve as a sort of external pocket. And The Hare With Amber Eyes is about how the netsuke came into the author’s possession, and where it was before.

Edmund De Waal‘s great uncle Iggie owned a collection of 264 netsuke. De Waal, a world-reknowned ceramicist, studied in Japan, and often visited Iggie and his partner, Jiro, in Tokyo. He learned that the netsuke belonged to Iggie’s parents, Emmy and Viktor Ephrussi, and that Iggie and his siblings played with them as children. They had come to rest in their vitrine in Emmy’s dressing room because Viktor’s cousin Charles Ephrussi had given them to the couple as a wedding gift.

When The Hare With Amber Eyes opens, De Waal recalls learning after Iggie’s funeral that Jiro wants him to “look after the netsuke.” He tells readers that back home in London, he carried a netsuke of a medlar fruit around in his pocket. He thought about where it had come from. He wrote down “the bones” — what Iggie told him about the collection. And he realized he wanted to learn the rest of the story.

He knows “my family were Jewish . . . staggeringly rich, but I don’t really want to get into the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss.” Instead, he writes, “I want to know what the relationship has been between this wooden object I am rolling in my fingers – hard and tricky and Japanese – and where it has been…. I want to know what it has witnessed.” And a few paragraphs later, “I realize that I’ve been living with this netsuke business for too long. I can either anecdotalise it for the rest of my life – my odd inheritance from a beloved elderly relative — or go and find out what it means.”

And so he does. He really goes — to libraries and archives in London where he can hunt down clues. To Paris. Vienna. Tokyo. Odessa. And in the end, home. And what he learns is fascinating, heart breaking, incredible, and finally, life affirming.

At the book club (and in some reviews) some felt De Waal should have told a more complete story of his family, but he never meant to. Some audiences have asked whether the writing of the book led De Waal to epiphanies about his identity or caused him to pursue restitution — his family’s riches were confiscated by the Nazis. I think all of this misses the point. This a book about connections, between generations, between collectors and object, between what has survived and all that is lost.

De Waal’s approach is to chronicle his imposing relatives as a means of tracing the netsuke, because they connect him to the past. The family is part of his story, yes. The way Charles was cut out of Paris society after the Dreyfus affair (and snubbed by anti-Semite friends Renoir and Degas) the way they were robbed of everything, even their names, by the Nazis. The way Iggie, Elisabeth (De Waal’s grandmother) and their siblings were scattered around the world after the war. The way they became  “. . . a family that could not put itself back together.”

DeWaal writes, “I’m not entitled to nostalgia about all that lost wealth and glamour from a century ago.” He learns how the netsuke moved from 1880’s Paris to early 20th century Vienna to post-war England and Tokyo and now back to London. The family are certainly fascinating. Especially Charles, a friend of many of the Impressionists as well as Proust. And Iggie, the great-uncle who passes the netsuke on to De Waal and who ran away from Vienna and the family bank to be a fashion designer before serving in Normandy as an intelligence officer and becoming, after all, a very successful banker in post-war Japan.

Equally fascinating is the Viennese maid, known only as Anna to De Waal, who stayed with her mistress even after the Anchschluss, and even then played a key part in the story of the netsuke while the Nazis made her work in the Palais Ephrussi as its riches were plundered. And Elisabeth, De Waal’s indomitable grandmother, who got her parents safely out of Vienna, and “provided a kind of centre” for the family diaspora from her new home in England. The incomplete nature of their story is the story — this is a family whose story was fractured, repeatedly, by anti-Semitism in several generations.

Through discussions of literature, art, aesthetics, culture and society, De Waal traces the netuke’s path, as well as his family’s, and tells us what the rooms looked like where they were displayed, what the people who held them wore and talked about and what their lives and cities and world was like. But he doesn’t tell the entire story, and he can’t. He explains, “There are the places in memory you do not wish to go with others.” His grandmother, his great-uncle offered some remembrances, but De Waal notes, “I remember the hesitancies when talking to Iggie in old age; hesitancies that trembled into silences, silences that marked places of loss.” Elisabeth would not talk about Emmy.

“Stories and objects share something, a patina….Perhaps patina is a process of rubbing back so the essential is revealed . . . . But it also seems additive.” De Waal has added his patina to the story of the netsuke – he has revealed the humanity in the story of these collectible objects. He has added the staggering wealth and staggering loss, the disrupted lives, and the small moments when people — Proust and Renoir and children and Japanese cocktail party guests and faceless visitors to Charles’ salon or Iggie’s apartment — picked up the netsuke and rolled them, like he did, in their fingers.

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Too much reading?

Sometime towards the end of April, the Computer Scientist said something that stopped me cold. He noticed my frantic checking of how many pages were left in whatever book I was trying to finish ahead of an event at Gibson’s or a library due date, and he said, “Reading isn’t even fun for you anymore, it’s just another deadline.”

Then he pointed out the stacks of books beside my bed, the pile of magazines in my favorite chair, and the many sections of the New York Times at my place at the kitchen table and said, “You don’t enjoy what you’re reading, you just see it as what you have to finish, and it stresses you out.” Have I mentioned he has a reputation for giving direct and insightful feedback?

As you can imagine, my immediate reaction wasn’t to say, “Thank you for your searingly honest critique, darling, I’ll change my frenzied behavior at once.” Instead, I probably made a face, and I likely said something defensive and possibly a bit rude, although I refuse to confirm or deny that.  Unruffled by my response, the Computer Scientist rolled over and went blissfully to sleep. I obsessed.

And you know what? He’s right. After this conversation, we had a couple of whirlwind weeks chock full of children’s activities, a visit from his parents, and my own visit with my mom in South Carolina. I had less time to read (except on the four airplanes and airports I passed through, in which I read four books), so I was forced to make hard choices.  I came to a series of editorial decisions about my reading.

First of all, when it comes to periodicals, I am going to let go of my inherited belief that if you pay for something, you’d better get your money’s worth by using it all up — when it comes to the Times or Economist or all of the monthly magazines we get, I am going to allow myself not to read every last article. Yes, they are expensive. But we subscribe to many of them in part because we believe in their existence and wish to express our support. I am still getting plenty of value for my money even if I only read the parts I find most interesting or appealing.

Second, I simply have to admit that it’s impossible for me to read every event book at Gibson’s, especially as our schedule fills.  If it’s something I would want to read anyway or feel curious about, I’ll read it; if not, I will outsource my pre-event reading to family members, friends, or co-workers.

And if none of them has read the book before the event, I’ll rely on the tools I already use as a reader: Goodreads and the many excellent book blogs that are just a Google search away. A quick shout out to my father-in-law — he wrote a very helpful brief  on Walking to Gatlinburg, which I had no time to read. Thanks!

I also came to realize, after my own mother told me I looked “tired” (code for “wow, those are some bags under your eyes, honey”) in the family Easter pictures, that I have to face the biological facts. I am past the age where I can stay up until 2 am finishing a book and/or writing a blog post, especially two or three nights in a row, and still feel (and look) human. No more all-nighters. Unless a book is so darn fantastic I can’t help myself . . . .

Of course, all of these decisions came at the end of the month. So I actually read fourteen books since my last post about a month ago. The last one which I stayed up until all hours finishing was The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, which I was reading in a hurry so I could mail it back to my aunt, who lent it to me and had a list of friends waiting for it. I loved this book. I wanted to be friends with both Skeeter and Aibileen.

I’ve read the criticism — the plot is too obvious, the whites too one dimensional and typecast — but I think the people who are bothered by The Help are squeamish at one of two things: either they are uncomfortable with how truthful Stockett is, or they hate to admit that a number one best seller isn’t mind candy.  I’d rather look at the total package — and I think this book  is well written and delivers a great story, memorable and fully formed characters, and page turning entertainment.

Just as not everyone in 19th century England was as mean-spirited or good as Dickens’  villains or heroes, Stockett doesn’t intend to say that all 1960’s Southerners fell into her characters’ molds, either.  The Help is a rollicking good read as well as thought provoking social commentary, packaged in a populist style —  just like Dickens. Kathryn, if you are ever in New England, I’ll drop everything to have you at Gibson’s!

Another novel that manages to be both social commentary and hilarious fun is Co-Opted, by Joan Bigwood. Joan’s sister, Kate, is my friend and rector at St. Paul’s church here in Concord. Her novel follows the transformation of a stylish and successful New York City mom, Francesca Wilson, as her family moves to Palo Alto in the dot.com era. Facing an abrupt lifestyle change, as well as worries about her aging parents, Francesca finds herself becoming involved in a co-op preschool. She discovers talents she never knew she had, and a community to help her through some difficult times. It’s a gentle book, and it’s funny.

Those same words also describe Carl Lennertz‘s delightful memoir, Cursed By A Happy Childhood: Tales of Growing Up, Then and Now.  This charming book is both a tribute to his own happy childhood in what was then a small, sleepy town on Long Island and a reminder to today’s parents that we shouldn’t over think so much. The book is a series of short pieces Lennertz wrote to his daughter as she was approaching the teen years — around the age of my own Preteen.

Even though his family’s life in Manhattan is different in many ways than my own family’s life in New Hampshire (and all the many other places we’ve lived), the book resonated with me. Lennertz writes about things we have all experienced as kids and parents — getting really into certain music, enjoying sweet corn, trying not to seem uncool, swearing (I chuckled over the swear jar — something we tried a few years ago to no effect) and even deciding what will define us as adults.  Both as a lesson in thoughtful reflection and a slice of childhood and parenting in contemporary America, Cursed By A Happy Childhood is welcome relief from both didactic parenting tomes and painful memoirs of unhappy childhoods. This book would be a great Fathers’ Day or new dad gift.

I read five other nonfiction books, including two books by authors who came to the store (Birdology, by Sy Montgomery, and Eaarth, by Bill McKibben), another book recommended by my rector, and two other books of essays: A Place on Water, which I gave the Computer Scientist a couple of years ago for his birthday, and How Did You Get This Number, by Sloane Crosley, which is coming out in June.

I read A Place on Water because Wes McNair was one of three poets reading at the Concord Audi at this year’s April poetry event, and he wrote one of the the three essays in the book. And, I adore his work — there’s no other way to describe it. His two neighbors on Drury Pond in Maine, Bill Roorbach and Robert Kimber, wrote the other two essays. This is a gorgeous book — really, each piece is so beautifully wrought, and yet feels as effortless as floating in a perfect little pond on a summer day. You’ll want a camp in Maine, badly, when you’re through reading.

Sloane Crosley is brilliant. I read the advance copy of How Did You Get This Number on a plane, and people stared at me as I laughed out loud. She is everything I love in an essayist — funny, smart, wickedly observant, interesting, and relevant. Her book is a little hip and edgy —  you might feel a teensy bit like you’re not worthy of her Manhatttan lifestyle (I did), but she also writes about her childhood and you’ll realize she is just like you, only cooler, when you read those parts. I’m definitely going back to read I Was Told There’d Be Cake, soon (update: I picked it up today at the library). It’s been on my “to-read list” (that pesky thing just multiplies like some kind of feral animal) for a long time, and Cake has been bumped to the top.

I enjoyed Birdology, although I was taken aback by some of the brutality — the chapter on birds of prey is not for the squeamish, or for quail fans (quick aside:  my in-laws were in town for Sy’s event, and my father-in-law is particularly fond of the quail in their backyard in California; unfortunately some quail meet their demise in the book). Sy is an indefatigable researcher, which is something I admire in a person, and she writes with such passion that even someone like me who is only mildly interested in birds can’t help being fascinated.

I was left with a deep admiration for hummingbird rehabilitators, chickens (they’re not dumb, it turns out), and parrot research that has led to breakthroughs in the understanding of language acquisition. My daughter came away from Sy’s event with a new phrase to torment her brother with: “cut the crap,” which one of the parrots Sy met said with relish. We now spend soccer games daring each other to yell that.

Eaarth is that rare volume that is not only an Important Book but is also humorous, instructive, and somehow even a bit upbeat, even though we’re more or less screwed if we keep adding CO2 to the atmosphere. Bill McKibben is one of the great men of our times — and we just had around 150 people in the store to hear him last night. Have I mentioned lately how much I love Concord?  I visited my mother in Columbia, SC, a university town of around 50,000, twice that if you include Ft. Jackson. Their indie bookstore closed. Concord, you rock.

As Hillary Nelson, one of my favorite freelance writers, said in her review in Thursday’s Concord Monitor,  Eaarth is also a “hopeful and, well, patriotic book, a testament to the durability and flexibility of American democracy. Only a writer as good as McKibben could pull off this feat.”  It’s true — and in person he is every bit as graceful and spellbinding as he is in print. Check out his work at 350.org. Join. Really, what are you waiting for?

Kate, my aforementioned rector at St. Paul’s Church, has been very supportive of our parish’s work welcoming refugees to our community. She told me her mother welcomed refugees in New England many years ago, and recommends This Flowing Towards Me by Marilyn Lacey, to anyone engaged in this ministry. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Lacey alternates between telling her own story of discovering her call to serve in refugee camps in Thailand and refugee resettlement in the U.S., and the stories of some of the remarkable people she has known.

Lacey takes her title from a Rumi poem; besides being a memoir of working with refugees, Lacey’s book also explores her personal experience of God “flowing” towards her in many ways, from a bulletin board notice to poetry to a church sign that caught her eye. She is an example of a person living a mindful life, open to the flow of spirituality, and willing to put her faith into action. But the book is not preachy — she tells it how it is for her, and if you’re not religious, you’ll still find plenty to admire and learn from in her travels to Sudan, Thailand, and many other places.

Poetry is certainly a door to inspiration for me — I felt so lifted by my close reading of the latest books from Maxine Kumin, Donald Hall, and WesMcNair (who were all brilliant, by the way — the reading was great fun, and the Computer Scientist came away an even more devoted Hall disciple), that I vowed to read poetry more regularly. I pulled two books off the “to read” shelf and dove in: Earthlight, by Hannah Stein, and Miracle Fair, by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Joanna Trzeciak.

Earthlight inspired me to pull out a few of my own poems and get back in the saddle — I hadn’t sent work out for a long time, in part because I was tired of “hopeful” rejection letters that either told me the review in question wasn’t really looking at new work (despite guidelines to the contrary) or that my poems were “close.” And in part because David Alpaugh’s article “The New Math of Poetry” is enough to end anyone’s literary aspirations.

My favorite of Hannah Stein’s poems in Earthlight were “This Time, This Place,” about the poet’s experience of a Monet exhibit at the Art Institute in Chicago; “Grace,” with my favorite lines in this collection, “The sky has hoarded brightness/like armfuls of lilac;” “Loving a Mathematician,” which makes the list of my favorite marriage poems, and is a lovely tribute to right brain/left brain partners; and “All But the Blackberries Themselves,” a poetic tribute to greed but also just a delightful poem about summer’s abundance and the way it lures us.

Wislawa Szymborska, and for that matter Joanna Trzeciak, are on another plane. A Nobel laureate whose work is not well known outside poetry circles and readers of Polish, Szymborska writes with a wry humor and a searing eye for truth. Poetry can be a window into the meaning of life — you could read poetry to study philosophy, if you were dedicated and maybe a little bit mad.

Szymborska could be your gatekeeper, your guide, your boatman. Whether she is writing about something as simple as a drop of water on her finger (“Water”) or boundless as the concept of zero (“A Poem In Honor Of”), these poems require multiple readings to enjoy their nuance and depth. I want to wallow in this glorious collection for a long time. Translation, as I have mentioned in previous bookconscious posts, is an incredible art. I’m so grateful for the talented Trzeciak and other literary translators who bring this kind of work to their own languages.

While we’re discussing translation, I finally got around to reading a delightful little book I’ve had in my “to-read” pile for awhile now, Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto. This was another airport read. Despite its brevity, this was a perfect little book, witty and wacky and True with a capitol T. I have great admiration for both contemporary and classical Japanese literature — what a marvelous world we live in, that I, who have no Japanese at all, can enjoy Murasaki Shikibu, Haruki Murakami, Basho, Shiki, and others, whenever I like.

But I digress. Kitchen is a book I plan to keep around for when the Preteen is a bit older and interested in relationships. I think Yoshimoto is almost Jane Austen-like in the way she delves into the society of her characters and probes their expectations, pride, and yes, prejudices. She writes at once about Japanese culture that feels exotic and mysterious to Western readers, and about universal emotions that connect us all as human beings: love, grief, friendship, family, coming of age. Read this book. It won’t take you long, and you’ll feel richer for it.

Speaking of Jane Austen, you get the feeling that Tracy Chevalier was channeling Jane when she wrote Remarkable Creatures. I haven’t enjoyed any of her books as well as this one since Girl With the Pearl Earring. I think I was drawn to this Remarkable Creatures because I’ve always been fascinated by Mary Anning.

I never knew about her complicated friendship with Elizabeth Philpot (I guess I’d read only very brief overviews of Anning’s fossil hunting until now), and her even messier relationships with many of the leading men of science in England and France.  Chevalier’s novel is just what I look for in historical fiction — detailed, intriguing, and well drawn, with enough facts to pique my curiosity and a plot to keep me reading.  I’d like to read The Fossil Hunter, by Shelley Emling, to fill in the rest of the facts.

On Monday, Gibson’s Book Club will be discussing Per Petterson‘s Out Stealing Horses.  I read it before my recent travels, and then I took his next book (due out in August in the U.S.), I Curse The River of Time, along for the plane rides. I really enjoyed both, but I had my reservations about the ending of the forthcoming book. In fact, I read it over three times on the way home, hoping somehow that it might get better. I’m afraid it didn’t. Still, I enjoyed Petterson’s writing very much, and I maintain that like the other books in translation I’ve explored these past few months, my reading life is richer for having made connections with literature from other countries.

Out Stealing Horses is a good book club choice, and I’m looking forward to hearing what our group has to say about it. It’s a somewhat poignant book, with a protagonist who is looking back in old age at a series of events in his youth that impacted him profoundly. Set at the end of World War II and in contemporary times, the novel takes a hard look at many of the universal questions I found myself drawn to in the rest of this month’s books  — who are our family, and how do we relate to them and to our real and remembered selves at different stages in our life? Are our memories trustworthy? What is trust? Is absence a form of love?

While I was busily buried in books, making connections, and likely driving my family crazy with my book light, baggy eyes, and absent-minded lost-in-thought musings, my family was also busy reading. The Preteen continued to read manga, including +Anima and Gakuen Alice 2. She’s reading Through the Looking Glass, and she and the Computer Scientist are each re-reading Harry Potter books.

I remembered that we have The Cartoon History of the United States by Larry Gonick, and the Preteen is enjoying that. We read aloud the entire eleven volume A History of US by Joy Hakim a few years ago, but I figured given her long interest in comic drawing, this might be appealing.  She likes it enough that I pointed out Gonick’s A Cartoon History of the Universe, Volumes 1-7, and she carried that off to her reading nook.

The reading nook is actually a corner of her closet — she has a much larger closet than the rest of us, and it’s well lit. She’s decorated it with all kinds of cool things on the walls and ceiling, and she has a big comfy chair in there, next to some shelves where she can keep books and display artwork and other items. It’s a very cool place. But she’s not in there as much these days because a) the weather is nicer so she can get outside and b) she’s adopted a pair of gerbils, and she spends more time playing with them. She also read Gerbils: The Complete Guide to Gerbil Care by Donna Anastasi this month, which Jammin’ Gerbils recommends as the definitive guide.

The Teenager finished The Edible History of Humanity, which he enjoyed tremendously (he keeps reminding us that hunting and gathering worked well)  and decided to see what else I had on the history shelves. He’s been reading A History of Knowledge by Charles Van Doren. He told me he likes how in-depth it is for a book that covers so much time. This book has reminded him how much he’s always enjoyed learning about ancient history, and has led him to consider colleges with classics departments.

Meanwhile, he’s not quite made up his mind whether to go straight to college (he’s a junior right now) or take a year off. Especially since his once-a-reference-librarian-always-a-reference-librarian mother keeps giving him more information to consider. Right now he has The Gap Year Book from Lonely Planet and Kristin White‘s The Complete Guide to the Gap Year on inter-library loan. Makes me wish I was young again.

The Computer Scientist read Steve Almond‘s Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, and he says, “Very enjoyable read for anyone that’s ever caught themselves a little too into a rock and roll band. Funny and insightful.” He also pronounced Steve Almond’s event the most hilarious author event he’s attended at Gibson’s.  Now he’s reading Lynne Olson’s Citizens of London, which bookconscious readers know I loved and recommended.  He’s considering a Star Wars read-a-palooza for summer.

What’s in my pile? I’m halfway through Jay Atkinson‘s Paradise Road, which is great fun so far, and I plan to read Peter Hessler’s Country Driving because his writing is brilliant and it was in at the library when I picked up the gap year books, and Sloane Crosley’s I Was Told There’d Be Cake for the same reasons. I also have Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector, and a book of Ted Kooser’s poems, and another of Donald Hall’s essays, plus a few interesting choices in the coming events books: The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare and I Thought You Were Dead, to name two.

So, Computer Scientist, if you’re reading this? You may be right, I may be crazy, but it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for (thanks, Billy Joel).

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