I Heart Memoir

I just wrote several pages in the journal I keep for my youngest son. I have done this for all three of my kids: kept a baby book for a year and then a monthly journal for as long as there's room in the blank book I buy (usually another year or two). Before you get all impressed, this is it. I don't do hand print art, I don't scrapbook pictures, I don't make treasure boxes of art from each of their school years. I don't craft. I just write. I enjoy the act of writing and the reflection on my children's growth each month. The process, however, gives me great respect for memoirists. I try to find a common thread, a uniting element, or at least some natural transitions, for one month of experiences, for only a few pages. Writers of memoir take years of their lives and hundreds of pages and not only tell what they remember, but tie it all together and make it into a good story. Because the story is really what it's all about, isn't it?

Post Traumatic Church Syndrome: A Memoir of Humor and Healing

Memoir by Reba Riley

Think this sounds, well, traumatic? Take a look at the peacock on the cover. It's not. True, Riley experienced a bit of a break down and left the conservative church/school/job/life she was in. True, she is suffering from an unknown physical ailment for most of the book. She also meets some people who have been truly abused at the hands of the church. But as Riley takes a year of her life to explore other religions and church denominations, she does so with humor (see subtitle), self deprecation, and a huge amount of grace. This reads more like the blog that was its first incarnation, than like a treatise on what's wrong with church today. It's more Glennon Doyle Melton than Rachel Held Evans (bloggers I love). And though I have not left the church I grew up in, I did explore many different churches while in college, and I do have many unanswered questions today about the role and future of the American church. So I resonated with many of her forays into different church groups, especially when she visits an all African American congregation (bless you, Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and your hats and your ban on bathroom breaks).

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise
Memoir by Ruth Reichl

Today I am making homemade applesauce, which makes me a little proud of myself, and chicken cooked in Campbell's soup, which makes me a little ashamed of myself. Especially considering the amazing recipes and tales of culinary adventures in this book. Reichl was the restaurant critic for the New York Times for a number of years in the 1990's. Early on in her career, she was "made" and ended up wearing a series of disguises in order to eat at restaurants without receiving special treatment. This world, a world of four star restaurants and cutthroat competition and fur wearing patrons and snooty maitre d's, was all new to me but made very real by Reichl's honest take on it. Through the book, she struggles with what her disguises reveal about her own character, as well as a career centered on excess. The amount of seafood and truffles and foie gras she eats is both attractive and appalling (I mean, I'm guessing here. I've never eaten most of those things.) It's a window into both this other world and this woman's soul.

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.

A New Purpose

I'm at an interesting juncture in my life. I'm taking a year off from teaching, just to take care of my family. I say JUST not because it won't fill my days (and nights, and weekends) or because it's not hard (stay at home parents, I feel ya) but because I'm not ALSO responsible for 70-90 other humans during the average day. My hours are no less full but my brain is just a little more relaxed. And my heart rate.

I'm looking forward to filling this time with many things (mostly things aged 9, 4 and 2), but one of them is reading for the purpose of becoming a better writer. I'm probably not going to read more, because I hope to write more, but I am going to read with a new lens. I find myself thinking about the pacing, the timelines, the character introductions, the continuity, the adverbs, rather than just enjoying the characters and story. And I compare. How is this like my writing, and how should mine be more like this, or is this not at all what I'm aiming for? I know I need to find a writing group to ping with questions like this, but for now, dear book club, I have you. So here goes.

Letters to the Lost
Novel by Iona Grey

Just as I both liked and disliked this book, I gleaned insights about what I do and don't want for my own writing. With a two part story line, set in contemporary and WW II era England, and the converging lives of a 1940's pastor's wife and an abused bar singer on the run from her ex-boyfriend, this seems to be right up my alley. I love that kind of story, for the quickness of the pacing and the variety of settings and different types of characters allowed by switching time periods. I do strive to do this in my own writing and saw some clever ways of making the story arcs cross over each other. I also admired the descriptions of the various spaces in the story: beautiful, sacred, neglected, impoverished, elaborate...the rendering of the settings lent itself well to the story, and I want to work on that. What dissatisfied me, and makes me eager to avoid in my own writing, is the convenience of certain plot conventions and character traits. The characters changed too quickly to reflect real relationships and the way we learn from mistakes, and the coincidences that ironed out kinks in the plot were too easily plopped in the characters' paths. I'm all for a happy ending but it doesn't have to be a Hollywood happy ending, you know? Lesson learned

Language Arts

Novel by Stephanie Kallos

Kallos is a Seattle author and I really enjoyed her first novel, Broken for You. She writes very realistic, rounded characters who are chipped in places but resilient. This one is about an English teacher, divorced and lonely, with an autistic son, who seems sort of in a midlife crisis but is really more asking and answering why his life is what it is. It's a convoluted story line, mostly about one year of the main character's childhood and present time, but with other voices and even some technical writing mixed in. I think because of the journalistic tone of some of the writing, it was off-putting to me. I almost quit this one but I had to have some questions answered. Yes, I skimmed the ending when I was about halfway through, like I often do, but this time it wasn't because I needed reassurance about characters I love. I needed to know it was going someplace. And it was, and it was a good place, so I'm glad I finished it. Is it something I want to write? No. I like Kallos's thoughtfulness and want someday to write more serious, yet still entertaining, literature like her. But it's maybe a bit too staid for me. I found myself drawn to the scenes of real places, though, and want to emulate that sense of place, as well as her obvious writing from what she knows, which is Seattle and teaching and a hint of loneliness.

Vacation Grab Bag

It's that time of year...vacation reads! My family takes an annual trip to a lake house and my favorite part of the week, aside from the eating, drinking, and sunning, is reading. Even better, my sisters and cousin and mama and grandma and I share books. It's like an actual book club, but we never have to go home and we wear our pj's most of the time. Love. Here, in a nutshell, are the books I read just before, during, and after vacation (Because, you know, I was packing and unpacking a family of five for a week at a lake. Who has time to blog amidst such hot chaos?)

Everything I Never Told You

Novel by Celeste Ng

At the end of the school year, one of my (favorite) students asked me why we didn't read more books or articles by women of color. I blinked and said, "Good question." So together we selected some books from a list of recommendations a friend found, and this was one of them. I hope I see this student again (she may be moving) so we can talk about it. It's kind of dark, which is right up her alley and also her chosen hair color. A blended Asian American-Caucasian family loses their teenage daughter to drowning, and, true to the title, eventually spills everything they've been keeping from each other. The secrets are varied and decades old, some small and some shocking. It's how they forgive each other that made the book readable for someone who doesn't love darkness.

The Marriage Game: A Novel of Queen Elizabeth
Historical Fiction by Alison Weir

Researched to a the finest detail (most of the dialogue is quotes from primary sources) but eloquently rendered, this book is true historical fiction (which is kind of a loose term most of the time). The book encompasses Elizabeth's entire adulthood, with hints of her childhood, but focuses mainly on Elizabeth's continual ploys to stay single and rule on her own. I love English history and literature, but I think I may have read too many books about the Tudors, because I was hoping for some revelations or new theories, but if you've read or seen much about Elizabeth, there's nothing new. I was a little bored. In fact, I made myself finish it the day before leaving for the lake so I didn't have to read it there (or lug it along--it's heavy).

Orhan's Inheritance

Sort of historical fiction by Aline Ohanesian

I chose this one at random from the library shelf, and to be honest I thought it was called "Orphan's Inheritance." Adoption and finding one's roots is a theme of the novel I'm writing, so I was intrigued. Those themes are in this book, but in a subtle way. It's actually a beautiful but disturbing book about the genocide of Armenian Christians in Turkey during World War I, including a quest by one man to find out more about his grandfather's life during that time. It was not what I expected and sometimes that's the best kind of book. I also gleaned a few ideas for my own writing. One thing I'm thinking about now is the balance between sorrow and joy in a novel. Sorrow makes the story and joy completes it, but how much to have of each, and where?

800 Grapes
Chick Lit by Laura Dave

See what I mean about playing it loose with genres? Technically this is a novel or women's fiction, but to me, this was the epitome of a vacation read. It was fun, it was fast, it was easy. I could so easily picture the kind of flat characters, and predict the plot, that it seemed like a movie more than a book. The main character (I can't even remember her name) finds out a secret about her fiance, her parents, and their family vineyard all in the same day. Whirlwind week before wedding ensues. I expect to see it in the theaters soon (although I'll only rent it when my sister comes over for a girls night).

The Grace Keepers

Futuristic folktale by Kirsty Logan

The jacket of this mentions Scottish folk tales, and I was in a hurry with two boys tugging on my legs as I chose it at the library, so I was surprised to enter Water World. Remember that weird Kevin Costner movie? Seriously, this is a more thoughtful version of that. Two women's lives both fall apart and collide, and there's also a floating circus. The way that sentence is composed is how this book feels, oddly tangential. During and after reading, I always felt like I was on a boat, literally rocking with the waves, even when I wasn't floating on the lake. All around, a weird experience.

The Lost Concerto
Mystery by Helaine Mario

I finished The Grace Keepers just after arriving home from vacation and was eager to start a new story. Reading is my escape and nothing requires escape quite like a the post-vacation aftermath of laundry, cleaning, and grocery shopping. Fail. I do not do mysteries. There is something off putting to me about the description of a sinister man sitting in a cafe, watching a woman come and go across the street. Maybe this could have improved--there was almost a Dan Brown quality to it--but I didn't stick around to find out. Life is too short to read bad books.


The Girl You Left Behind

Novel by Jojo Moyes

If this was a contest, this book would win. I may have go get everything Jojo Moyes has ever written now. In fact, I thought this was one of her books written prior to Me Before You, but it's brand new, so that means I have some other good reading ahead. This one is starkly different, too. There's a parallel story of a woman during WWI whose husband is a painter, and the woman in current day who owns the painting, connected by a bitter struggle over who should own the painting. Moyes writing is deceptively simple and I think that's what makes it great. I gobbled this one up and I hope to one day write like her. That is all.

My Life in Books

At The Water's Edge

Novel by Sara Gruen

My best-friend-who-shares-my-name (so-called to be distinguished from my other best friends, in case anyone is reading this) asked me for book recommendations today. I mention this because 1) I couldn't remember the last book I'd read. Not just the title, but ANYTHING about it. My memory is that bad these days. And 2) This is one of my favorite books that I've read recently but I wasn't sure she'd like it as much as I did, which led me to thinking about why we like the books we do.

So after I'd looked up my reading history on my library's webpage (thanks, NCRL, for keeping me in books and jogging my memory), I remembered I hadn't written about this! And I thought it was so so good! It wasn't as well written as recent reads (All the Light We Cannot See) or as trendy as others (The Orphan Train) but it had all MY things, my book must-haves. It was written by an author I know (she wrote Water for Elephants), so there's less chance of some unpleasant surprise lurking within; it was set in another time or place, specifically 1940's Scotland; it contains likable main characters and a few unexpectedly endearing supporting characters; above all else, there is a satisfying and hopeful ending, in this case with a little romance as an added bonus.

But in reflecting, I was surprised to notice there is a hint of weirdness to my taste these days. The main plot of this book is, oddly, a group of American socialites searching for the Loch Ness Monster. It doesn't look like it will go that way from the cover or the beginning, but I'm glad it does; that's the best part of the book, the fantastical mystery of a misty lake and the encounters of the locals and adventurers. It reminded me a bit of Outlander, actually, and made me realize that the last few books I've really enjoyed (here and here) have some magic in them. Interesting...

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Nonfiction by Rebecca Skloot

And here's the reason why I couldn't remember the book I finished last. I feel like I've been reading this FOREVER. It is a GOOD book, don't get me wrong, and I'll sing its praises in a minute. But I just do not get into non-fiction. At all. I think this book is the reason I've gotten almost all of my summer house projects done in the last two weeks: I don't have a book pulling me into my chair. That, and mild OCD, but that's another story.

THIS story is of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman whose cancer cells were harvested without her knowledge and used after her death for countless medical research projects. It's the story of her family, who didn't know about the HeLa cells (named after their unwitting donor) and their struggle with poverty despite the millions of dollars earned by their matriarch's cells. It's a story of research, racism, religion, and reconciliation. It's incredibly interesting, completely comprehensible, and a bit unsettling. I'm glad I read it. I'm glad I'm done with it. I'm on to novels with pictures of faraway places on their covers. Happy summer, everyone!

What's in a Genre?

I am trying to span all the genres in my recent readings. Not really but it feels like that. I just read what can only be called chick lit, followed by middle grade fiction, and am now halfway through a book that is labeled Religion/Christian Life/Spiritual Growth, although I think the author may protest.

First Frost

Novel by Sarah Addison Allen

I picked this book completely by the author. I didn't even glance at what it was about. Sarah Addison Allen is almost a Maeve Binchy, though not quite as classy or maybe just not as British Isles, so it's an easy choice for me. I really enjoyed her first book, Garden Spells, but not as much her second book, Lost Lake (which I think I wrote about here but can't find) so I was excited to find that this is a sequel to Garden Spells. It's the sweet story of four generations of Southern women with a variety of mystical gifts, mostly connected to cooking and their mysterious garden. As is often true, the sequel is a bit of a let down when you find the characters changed too much or not enough, or the glamour or surprise of the first book is missing. But for the most part, this is another sweet study of human nature with some interesting bits of magic and a little suspense thrown in. Again, a lot like my friend Maeve.

The Honest Truth
Middle Grade Fiction by Dan Gemeinhart

This is exciting to me because the author is a local school librarian! Teachers can write books, and even get published! Yay! It's so encouraging. It took me a few pages to get into the book and I think that's a result of switching genres as rapidly as I have been. I have readers' whiplash. But once I got into it, I whipped right through this story of a young cancer patient who runs away to climb a mountain on his own. I liked all the characters, especially his chance encounters along the way. I LOVED that this is very real story that shows how full of hurt kids' lives can be and the realities our children face today, but without anything that I couldn't recommend to my own daughter or students. No swearing, sex, or scary stuff. Just real hardship and real hope. I also like that it's set in Wenatchee. It got me thinking about the settings of my two manuscripts.


Searching for Sunday

Religious Memoir by Rachel Held Evans

I'm not actually done with this book but since it's non-fiction and therefore won't devastate me with a terrible ending, I think it's fair to say I will keep liking it.  There was more of the genre-confusion at the beginning and again it took me a while to get into it, but now that I am, I'm really interested. This more than the others on this page makes me want to talk to other people about it (in person, I mean, not just in my head here). I've said before that I don't read many self help books or religious books because they make me feel more guilty than helped. That is so not the case here. That's why I said I think Rachel would question the genre label on this book, and why I re-assigned it in my sub-title. I think this is more a memoir, a kind of story that Rachel is telling about how she came to question the church and question God and BE OK WITH THE QUESTIONS. She also wrote her story in Faith Unraveled, but this time there is more a bent on why other young Christians are leaving church, and why some are coming back but in a different way. At a time when church is coming to mean many different things, I'm finding a lot of "me toos" in the book. And I think that's what it's meant to be about. Having a conversation about how we understand God today and being able to find someone to say "me too" with.

Mother's Day Twofer

I, like most modern moms, have a choice to make every day. After my MUSTS are done-- going to work, taking care of my family, keeping the laundry and dishes from piling up and flowing out the windows--I have a choice. I am very blessed to have this choice, considering so many moms or dads or grandmas don't have any free time at all. But every day I choose what to do with my approximate hour and a half of time to myself. 

My choices generally include: 

1) Writing. I love to write. This blog, my novel, diaries of my kids' antics, funny facebook posts; most are not a chore for me . 

2) Exercise. A chore, definitely a chore. I know some people who love to exercise and I know they are not crazy, but the day I say I love to exercise, you might want to check which vitamins I've been taking and which country they were made in. 

3) Spending time with friends. This is a rare choice since my friends are all as busy with above mentioned things as I am, so this takes months of planning and happens maybe once a month. 

4) Spending time with my husband. See #3. Ok, this happens more often than once a month, because we live in the same house, but since we're tired, it usually includes #5

5) Watch TV. This happens often. We binge-watch Netflix series. Right now we're on Season 7 of Friends. I miss those guys. 

And we come to number 6, the big winner, which usually happens above all else: reading. It's just the best. I love my friends and my husband (many of whom are reading this, I hope) but, sorry guys, my book is more available than you are. And the people in my book understand when I fall asleep on them in the middle of a sentence. So yes, most of what I've been doing these days is reading. These books, as a matter of fact. 

The Museum of Extraordinary Things

Novel by Alice Hoffman

If you don't recognize this book, try looking at the second image. It seems that it's the more common book cover based on a Google search. I'm not sure which I prefer, just like I'm not sure what I think of this book. I wish someone would tell me what to think. It's by the author of The Dovekeepers, which is why I read it (I actually think I gave it to my mom and she gave it back to me and then I may have accidentally turned it in to the library. Sorry, Mom.)

I loved the history in The Dovekeepers and I love in this one the historical look at New York in the Industrial Age, but I don't love any of the characters until near the end. It's a boy meets girl story set against a background of a human wonders museum/freak show, a factory fire and the ensuing 

political and social fall out, the development of old New York, and the coming of age of a lonely girl and an Orthodox Jewish boy. It has all the elements that made Dovekeepers so great, except the female relationships, but is a little slower moving and somehow, even though you don't know the end like you do with the historical Masada in Dovekeepers, it's less climactic. I don't know. Read it and tell me what you think.

Chesnut Street

Short Stories by Maeve Binchy

 

I know what I think of Dame Maeve, though. I adore her. Here is a girl that I would get out of my pj's to spend time with, and that's high praise. I don't think I've read everything by Maeve but only because she's written so very much. When I saw this on the new books list of the library mail service, I was surprised and pleased, because I thought Maeve was dead. Turns out she is, and I am so sad, but I am so glad that her husband scraped the bottoms of her desk drawers for these short stories and collected them into a book for us, her grieving readers. 

I just get so much comfort from her writing. It's earthy and real, with twists you come to expect and characters you come to love. Even though the short stories don't always have happy endings, they leave you thinking the world is an ok place to be. I need that kind of story when so many of my students' lives are terrible and the news is terrible and apparently most of our favorite foods are terrible. This is about people, with faults, who eventually make good or bad decisions but they turn out more or less okay, told with a sense of humor. It's my go-to, feel good, kind of book. 

Please tell me, what do you read when you need to feel good? Because Dame Maeve is gone and I can re-read her forever but I may need a new go-to now and then. Thanks!