Remembering Stegner

I recently read an essay by Wendell Berry in which he discusses and praises Wallace Stegner's first novel, Remembering Laughter, published in 1937. It is very different from Crossing to Safety and Angle of Repose, both of which I read years ago. 

The novel centers around Margaret and Alec Stuart, a prosperous couple living on a farm in Iowa.  When Margaret's younger sister Elspeth arrives to live with them, a chain of events are set in motion that ultimately leads all three of them to live separate and unfulfilled lives.   This was a very beautiful book - exquisite writing, crystal clear scenes, a brilliant capturing of unspoken grief, hurt, and love.  This is an early contender for one of my favorite books of 2016. 

The novel reminds me of other books featuring love triangles, such as One Foot in Eden and Ethan Frome - might be interesting to read these books back to back.  All are brilliantly written!  

Dakota Dreamin'

I once heard someone say that when they go to the library, they will pick the book to the left or right of the book they were originally looking for, and just see what happens.  I found myself in the 900s section of the library the other day searching for a guide book for the Dakotas.  I noticed a book, aptly called, Dakota, a memoir by Kathleen Norris.  It's rare for me to start reading a book that I've heard nothing about, but there is something liberating about a literary whim!  

Being very fond of wide open plains, big sky, and rural landscapes, I've been dreaming of going to the Dakotas this year.  Norris had been living in New York City with her husband when they learned of the opportunity to live in the house built by her grandparents in an isolated town on the border of North and South Dakota, and decided to pursue small town life on the great plains.   She describes the push and pull of living in a small town, though she says, "I make no attempt in this book to resolve the tensions and contradictions I find in the Dakotas between hospitality and insularity, change and inertia, stability and instability, possibility and limitation, between hope and despair, between open hearts and closed minds."  While I felt the book lacked a clear structure and seemed thematically repetitive, there were many beautiful descriptions and passages that were illuminating for me as someone with little experience with small town rural life.  Here are some of my favorite passages:

"Magnificent old words like farrow, common English five hundred years ago, are still in use on the Plains."

"Plains speech, while nearly devoid of "-isms" and "ologies" tends toward the concrete and the personal"  the weather, the land, other people."

"Because it can't look outward, the town begins to turn in on itself, and a schismatic ultimately self-defeating dynamic takes hold."

 "Such outsiders can unwittingly pose a threat to the existing social order, and if their newcomers' enthusiasm doesn't wear off, if their standards don't fall to meet the town's, and especially if they keep on trying to share what they know, they have to be discouraged, put down, even cast out."

"Interlibrary loan is an unwelcome link to a larger world, forcing us to recognize that we're not as self-sufficient as we imagine ourselves to be."

"Hanging up wet clothes gives me time alone under the sky to think, to grieve, and gathering the clean clothes in, smelling the sunlight on them, is victory. "

"It seems a wonder to me that in our dull little town we can gather together to sing some great hymns, reflect on our lives, hear some astonishing scriptures (and maybe a boring sermon; you take your chances), offer some prayers and receive a blessing." 

A Medical Memoir

Damon Tweedy's Black Man in a White Coat:  A Doctor's Reflection on Race and Medicine, is a very readable and interesting memoir, starting from Tweedy's days in med school, ending in his successful career in psychiatry at Duke.  We follow his journey as he learns about health disparities along racial lines (as he puts it, "Being black can be bad for your health") and experiences racial prejudice himself from both patients and others within the medical field.  I would suggest pairing Tweedy's memoir with The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, another fascinating look at race and medicine.  

Come On Eileen

Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh's debut novel, was the first book I read in 2016.  It's a sinister, dark, intriguing story of a young woman who lives with her alcoholic father and works at a boys' prison in a wintry New England town.  With an aura of Hitchcock, Poe, and Highsmith, but in a voice all her own, Moshfegh weaves an unforgettably twisted bildungsroman, as Eileen discovers her own strengths and vulnerabilities, and also unearths the lengths she will go to escape the grit and claustrophobia of her life. It's unnerving and compelling, even cringe worthy, and I couldn't put it down.  Plus, I'll never think of icicles in the same way again (luckily I'm not often contemplating them given my California life)!

Favorite books of 2015

This year brought many personal and health challenges which took me away from my blog and even from books in general.  My work also consumed me in a way it hadn't before, resulting in me wanting to spend less time in front of a computer in my free time.  I hope to be a more consistent blogger in 2016!  Here's a list of my favorites from 2015:

1. The Story of the Lost Child - Elena Ferrante
2. Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
3. A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara
4. Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey
5. Stoner - John Williams
6. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (re-read)
7. A Long Way Home - Saroo Brierley
8. The Last Bookaneer - Matthew Pearl
9. Under the Udala Trees - Chinelo Okparanta
10. Montana 1948 - Larry Watson

Honorable mentions to Wendell Berry and Gloria Steinem, who also helped to spark the activist in me (again)!