A is for Autumn

Teachers love fall, and I may be staying home with kids, but the teacher in me hasn't diminished. Fall feels like more a rebirth kind of season to me than spring, with all new opportunities for learning: learning new people, new ways of doing things, and of course, new ideas. That may have been in my mind on a very subconscious level when I picked my three most recent books. I have learned a great deal from the first two and am really enjoying the third already. And two of them are (gasp) nonfiction.

The Secrets of Mary Bowser

Historical Fiction by Lois Leveen

Did you know that some free African Americans posed as slaves during the Civil War in order to spy in the South for the North? This amazing fact seems like it should be common knowledge. More importantly, this amazing story should be told to children and taught in schools. Mary Bowser was a slave in Virginia, freed by her mistress and sent to school in Philadelphia, helped with the Underground Railroad, and then returned to Virginia during the war to act as a hired out slave in Jefferson Davis's presidential mansion. Mary was an amazing person, portrayed here honestly, with doubts and selfish moments, but ultimately as an unknown hero.

It gets my ire up a bit that so many women with big roles in American history have very little known about them. It reminds me of the book The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd and how little I knew about the women involved in the abolition movement. Women indeed hold up half the sky.

As novels go, this is true historical fiction in that it is based on the lives of real people during significant moments in history, but with fictionalized dialogue and minor characters. The result is not stilted but flows evenly as a story should. Leveen's research seems both deep and wide in her understanding and portrayal of the times and their issues.

If you ask me, Mary Bowser should have been on the ballot for the new face of the $20 bill.

The End of Your Life Book Club
Memoir by Will Schwalbe

This is it, folks. This is a book ABOUT BOOKS! And there is a LIST of books at the back. Shudder of ecstasy.

I probably shouldn't admit to such enthusiasm, because this book is actually about the books the author read with his mother in the last two years of her life. When Mary Anne Schwalbe is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Will brings books along as he sits with her through chemo treatments, and they end up reading and discussing the books together. They become intentional about reading the same books and call it a book club, sometimes reading about her cancer but more often reading a great variety of classics and contemporary books.

Their discussions bring the books deeply into their current experiences, as well as providing an escape from those same situations. I relate completely to this dual role of literature in my life, as I hope you can see through this blog. I can't pretend to be as deeply insightful or as well read as the Schwalbes, though. Mary Anne's vast life experiences and sense of urgency due to illness, and Will's years in publishing and insomnia, lead both to read and understand far beyond me.

Two books I wrote down from their list of reads are Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book , which is not at our library and I may need to actually buy, and the Jeeves series, which I coincidentally picked up from my grandma's "little library," the shelf of free books she has in her yard for neighbors to exchange. I guess I'll be reading Jeeves first. But after my last non-fiction foray, Post Tramautic Church Syndrome by Reba Riley. Don't worry--so far it reads a lot lighter than it sounds. I mean, there's a peacock on the cover. How serious can you take a peacock.