As Good as Larry Watson

I've been a fan of Larry Watson ever since I read Montana, 1948, so of course I was very excited to see that he published a new novel recently, entitled As Good as Gone.  Watson is a master at engaging the reader quickly, with his interesting characters amidst the eastern plains of Montana.  His writing is a niche blend of mystery, novel, and Western, that I greatly enjoy.  While As Good as Gone kept me reading, I found it a bit lackluster in comparison to American Boy and Montana, 1948, which seemed more fully realized.  Then again, why not just read everything Watson has written?  His smart writing and great dialogue are sure to entertain!  

A Burning Flame

I recently re-read James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, and I highly recommend you read it as soon as possible.  As I was taking in Baldwin's words, I found myself earmarking multiple passages on every page until I finally just gave up and realized that every single page of this fierce book is filled with powerful, unforgettable, and essential thoughts about race and racism in America, and that it is the kind of book that should be read right now, and then re-read often.  I'm going to re-read this book at least once a year, because it rings as true now as it did in 1963 when it was first published.  It would be interesting to read it in tandem with Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, as Coates' recent memoir discusses similar themes and is written in a similar style to part of Baldwin's book (i.e. in the form of a letter to a young black man).  Bottom line - it is essential that everyone read this book.  Baldwin's message burns as bright as ever.  

Two Debut Reviews

Esme Weijun Wang's debut novel The Border of Paradise captivated me from the first few pages.  Set in mid twentieth century Brooklyn, Taiwan, and a high Sierra town in California, it explores the impact of mental illness on multiple generations of the Nowak family, and portrays how it brings the family close together and tears it apart.  Taking the first person perspectives of the different family members is not a new approach but is done in such a fresh and intimate way in Wang's deft hands.  I was curious about this very talented young writer, so I went to her website which is quite unlike other author websites I have visited.  She describes how the three themes on her mind in recent times are creativity, resilience, and legacy, all of which are touched upon in her novel.  It's evident after reading the novel and visiting her website that she someone bristling with creative ideas, and has published many essays and embarked on other artistic projects.  Highly recommended!

Yaa Gyasi's debut novel Homegoing has been hailed as a revelation - some have even gone so far as to suggest it is and will be the best book published in 2016.  This is one of those books (and I've had this feeling before, for example, when Zadie Smith published White Teeth and Chimamanda Adichie published Purple Hibisicus) in which I wonder what I was doing when I was 26 years old!  What Gyasi has achieved at such an early stage of her age is very impressive.  She's written a gorgeous, heartbreaking novel that spans eight generations and multiple geographies (coming full circle to Ghana, with many stops in between including Harlem and Alabama). What I find particularly interesting about her novel is that despite its breadth, each chapter almost stands alone as a vignette that explores deeply the characters' lives.  To achieve both breadth and depth is rare.  It's an essential read on slavery and its legacy.  

2016 mid-year reading roundup (a bit late)

It's time for my mid-year reading roundup. I read many thought provoking, memorable, and riveting books in the first half of 2016. Here are my top 10 favorites (out of about 50 total), in order of when I read them from January up until June 30th:
1. Eileen - Ottessa Moshfegh
2. Black Man in a White Coat - Damon Tweedy
3. Forgotten Country - Catherine Chung
4. The Splendid Outcast - Beryl Markham
5. Find a Way - Diana Nyad
6. House of Thieves - Charles Belfoure
7. The Hidden Wound - Wendell Berry
8. Mankiller: A Chief and Her People - W. Mankiller & M. Wallis
9. Becoming Nicole - Amy Ellis Nutt
10. The After Party - Anton DiSclafani

Wallace Stegner continues to blow me away with his range and beautiful writing (but I didn't want to crowd my top 10 list with all Stegner!). My favorites so far from this year have been his first novel, Remembering Laughter, and one of his collections of essays on the West, entitled Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (in particular the essay "Letter, Much Too Late").

The first book I read in the second half of the year is also spectacular - The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Homage to National Parks

The last time I read Terry Tempest Williams, other than some of her shorter works in Orion Magazine, was over 15 years ago in my undergraduate course, American Essays of Place.  I was delighted to see that she recently published The Hour of Land, a memoir of her experiences at some of her favorite national parks and monuments.  Each chapter focuses on a different park, and is written in a unique tone.  In addition to sharing her own experiences, she infuses the history and founding of several of the parks, as well as discusses more recent political issues.  

In describing her childhood experience falling and getting 136 stitches by venturing out into nature, Williams reflected, "We learned early on we live by wild mercy."  She describes the national parks as our "public commons" that inspire humility.  

Williams starts in describing Grand Teton National Park, a park she and her family has visited every single year of her life.  She brings us to the scene of Civil War reenactments at Gettysburg National Military Park.  She tours Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota with a ranger dedicated to keeping encroaching oil fields at bay.  She interviews people affected by the BP oil spill along Gulf Islands National Seashore.  

We are taken into a scene in which she and her family came very close to being swallowed up by a wildfire at Glacier National Park.  Williams also describes the tension between the park system and the Native Americans who, in the case of Glacier, are demanding reinstatement of their treaty rights for access to the land to hunt, fish, and use cultural sites for spiritual practices.  One interesting fact I learned is that  25% of all firefighters working today on wildfires in public lands are Native American.

We are invited along to Alcatraz, to experience Ai Weiwei's (a dissident artist and prisoner in his own country) exhibit and discusses the Native American occupation of the island.  I learned that the prison was ultimately closed because it was too expensive to run and the structures were compromised by its location in the middle of the bay, in which wind, water, and salt corroded the buildings.  I thought this line particularly interesting given my recent work with the Prisoners Literature Project - "To receive mail in prison means you have not been forgotten.  A piece of your humanity is restored.  Isolation is momentarily suspended."'

We learn about the "cultural ecotones" of Acadia National Park, which she defines as border areas where two different landscapes meet (civilization/wilderness, forest/ocean, meadow/woods), and discusses the tensions, but also the bountiful wildlife, that live on these edges.  She discusses the convergence of lands around national parks (Native American, private, state owned, public, etc.), and how challenges can exist along these boundaries, by those fiercely wanting to protect the land, and by those who want to develop it.  

In her chapter on Big Bend National Park, she states, "Perhaps that is the nature of deserts - to break us open, wear us down to bedrock."  She also describes another one of my favorite writers, and a friend of hers, Edward Abbey, as "the ultimate misanthrope."  She advises the reader, "What I know as a naturalist is that if you want to see wildlife, get up before dawn."

Williams is passionate about the parks and takes us into the intimate battles that environmental activists fight to protect our land, sometimes at great personal costs.  Ultimately, my reading of this book ended with a feeling of hope, that despite threats to our beautiful national parks that have given me so much personal happiness over the last few years, that there are many people who care fiercely about the preservation of these majestic, humbling places.    

Onions in the Stew

Betty MacDonald's Onions in the Stew drew me in, as I related in an earlier post, when I stumbled upon the 818 section at the public library.  The title alone seemed intriguing.  This is a memoir published in 1954 that focuses on MacDonald's decision to move to Vashon Island with her husband and two daughters.  During the time she lived on the island, she was both a writer and housewife, and describes day to day life on the island in a witty (and sometimes even hilarious) tone.  Some of my favorite quotes/expressions:

One bleak morning toward the end of the siege, I was shuffling around the kitchen contemplating a salad of noodles, Puss'n Boots and candle stubs, when Don announced, "My God, we have run out of whisky!" and offered to mush up to Vashon and get some supplies.

Rather defiantly I ate all the mushrooms, even flouncing up and getting a second helping...I was drinking my second cup of coffee when suddenly without any warning everything went black.

Glackity adolescents

Tiger, the boxer, looks very large and powerful but he spent one evening sitting on my lap eating gumdrops, watching Mr. Peepers on television and proving that appearances are deceiving.

It was uncomfortable, like trying to play bridge while an old aunt is choking to death on a fishbone in the same room.

The stacks: 818

I had a true "Dewey Decimalist" moment while at the public library the other day.  I found myself wandering the stacks, and stumbled upon the 818 section.  Here, I found lots of old looking somewhat encrusted books, but with very fabulous titles such as Onions in the Stew, My Sister Eileen, Oranges, and, Life Among the Savages.  I wasn't sure what the common thread was (memoirs?  light reportage?), so when I went home I found out that 818 refers to the quite general "American miscellaneous writings in English."  It is very rare for me to pluck books off the shelf with reckless abandon, having no idea what these titles might contain, but I quickly perused them and they all looked like gems.  In just a few hours, I polished off My Sister Eileen, by Ruth McKenney.  Come to find out, McKenney had a fascinating life.  Raised in Ohio and a precocious student (French, debate team, etc.), she was a tomboy with a sardonic wit to boot.  She studied journalism in college and wrote for the student newspaper, the Ohio State Lantern.  She survived one suicide attempt, and eventually moved to a moldy apartment in Greenwich Village with her sister Eileen.  Their real-life experiences were featured in a series of essays published in The New Yorker.  Anthologized in My Sister Eileen, they are highly readable and entertaining, with essay titles such as "No Tears, No Good," "A Loud Sneer for Our Feathered Friends," and "Mr. Spitzer and the Fungus."  Here are a few lines from "The Prince:"

He was handsome enough, if you like that dark, beady type.  Personally, one Georgian prince was enough for me....even Eileen, the belle of the Midwest, hadn't been able to gather in, during her heart-smashing career, so much as a Belgian count.  

So, having told one whopper, I went on, as is my unhappy custom, and told several more.  

An Inspiration: Diana Nyad

I've been telling everyone I know to read long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad's memoir Find a Way, which recounts her childhood and family relationships, her travels and interests, as well as her many attempts, and finally her success, in swimming from Cuba to Key West.  It's the best kind of memoir - intimate, vulnerable, inspiring, with moments of triumph.  I was rooting for Nyad from the very first page.  It's also a very well written book (Nyad studied for a PhD in comparative literature). 

I found all of the details and challenges of her swims to be totally fascinating - how she ultimately was able to stave off delirium, sharks, jellyfish, asthma, pain, currents, weather, and other seemingly insurmountable challenges to achieve her dream on her fifth attempt at the age of 64. 

Her absolute commitment to achieving her lifelong dream despite many setbacks, and her overcoming the circumstances of her childhood and adolescence serve as an inspiration and pushes the limits of what we think we may be capable of, and for that I'm grateful for having read this fascinating book. 

NYC: Gangsters in the Guilded Age

If you are looking for a fast-paced, intelligent caper, look no further than Charles Belfoure's House of Thieves, which captures 1886 New York City high society as well as its underworld.  Family secrets, deceptions, crime, glamour, gangsters, heists - it's all contained in this very entertaining novel, centered around John Cross, a successful architect, and his son who finds himself in over his head with gambling debt.  Part historical fiction, literary thriller, and family character study, this is a book you will stay up late at night to finish! 

Mankiller: A Chief and Her People

I highly recommend Mankiller:  A Chief and Her People, written by Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallis, a fascinating autobiography of Mankiller's life interwoven with her engaging telling of the history of the Cherokee people.  Mankiller spent her early childhood in Oklahoma before her family moved to San Francisco as part of the Bureau of Indian Affair's relocation plan.  Mankiller became an activist in the 1960s in San Francisco, got very involved in working to support the Native American community, was part of the Alcatraz Island occupation, and eventually went on to work for the Cherokee Nation, and made history by becoming the first female leader of a major Native American tribe (the Cherokee tribe is the second largest tribe in the U.S., after the Navajo tribe).   She was a champion of education, gender equality and creating economic opportunities for women, indigenous solutions, health access, job creation, and worked tirelessly for the rights of the Cherokee people as well as other indigenous groups.  She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Bill Clinton in 1998.  This was a very interesting, well written book, by and about an inspiring leader!

Old Timey Greatness from Stegner

I'm attempting to read all of Wallace Stegner in order of publication, though I had to give up on Fire and Ice (not my cup of tea).  But, I really enjoyed On a Darkling Plain, published in 1940, which is one of Stegner's early and lesser known works.  It tells the story of a young man injured during WWI, who, upon his return, decides he wants to live out all by his lonesome on the endless Saskatchewan prairie.  While he hopes to maintain little contact with society, surviving out alone on the plains necessitates him working in cooperation with his neighbors in times of harvest, illness, and winter preparation.  It's a fascinating look at a young man's psyche, and an old fashioned take on living "off the grid." It also has some old timey passages and beautiful descriptions that I greatly enjoyed, as follows:

Interesting-looking chap, pleasant but reserved,  all of him gathered up and held in, none of him spilling over in the garrulous small talk of lonely homesteaders come to town. 

He felt it himself all about him:  the good earth, old and tired and resting, veined with rivers almost too tired to flow; nature restful and healing as sleep in the sun to an old man, quiet as afternoons in an empty house.  That was the best of it:  the quiet, the aloneness.

You could probably feel a man as a person in this country, not as a mote in a dust storm, a figure in a multiple sum, a uniform in the marching ranks. 

His whole life was slowed to a timeless, vegetative placidity...with hours to hunt a thought down and exhaust it. 

In the delicious cool of the water he felt the hot pump of his heart ease up.  He ducked his head under, came up to throw back his hair in a water-slick pompadour. 

The harsh and beautiful brotherhood of death would drip away, and the war which settled no problem of nations would not even have settled the minds of the men who fought it. 

There was a tightening in the earth, a drawing in, a sense of little time remaining and much to be done.

It was a good feeling to feel a shoulder next to you when the bolt hit close. 

There was something about Vickers that calmed you down.  You felt the strength in him like a tempered wire, and it strung up your own slack and trebling nerves in sympathy. 

The Hidden Wound

I picked up The Hidden Wound, by Wendell Berry, and quite simply could not put it down.  Berry writes about racism from his own personal experiences growing up in Kentucky.  The work is lyrical, bold, and self-reflective, and I believe it would make a very interesting read in tandem with Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, a stunning work.  Some of the passages that I found the most thought provoking are as follows:

There is a peculiar tension in the casualness of this hereditary knowledge of hereditary evil; once you begin to awaken the realities of what you know, you are subject to staggering recognitions of your complicity in history and the events of your own life. 

I believe she had great intelligence, which had been forced to grow and form itself on the strange struggling wildly heterogeneous bits of information that sifted down to her through various leaks in the stratification of white society.

The crisis of racial awareness - the sense of being doomed by my history to be, if not always a racist, then a man always limited by the inheritance of racism, condemned to be always conscious of the necessity not to be a racist, to be always dealing deliberately with the reflexes of racism that are embedded in my mind as deeply at least as the language I speak. 

She was always showing you something:  a plant, a bloom, a tomato, an egg, an herb, a sprig of spring greens.  Suddenly you saw it as she saw it - and it entered shadowless into you mind.  I still keep the deepest sense of delight in the memory of the world's good tings held out to me in her black crooked floriferous hands. 

Whites fear what they feel, secretly or otherwise, to be the righteousness of the anger of the blacks;  as the oppressors feel, secretly or otherwise, morally inferior to those they have oppressed.  

...real healings and renewals in human life occur in individual lives, not in the process of adjusting or changing their abstractions or their institutions.  

In America...getting the job done is good.  Pondering as to how the job should be done, or whether or not it should be done, is apt to be regarded as a waste of time. 

We wish to rise above the sweat and bother of taking care of anything - of ourselves, of each other, and of our country.  We did not enslave African blacks because they were black, but because their labor promised to free us of the obligations of stewardship, and because they were unable to prevent us from enslaving them.  They were economically valuable and militarily weak....We decided that blacks were inferior in order to persuade ourselves that it was all right to enslave them. 

Stunning writing from Stegner

Wallace Stegner's collection of essays Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs is a delightful book, brimming with insights and personal stories that serve as an homage to the time Stegner spent in the American West.  By far my favorite essay was Stegner's letter to his late mother, entitled "Letter, Much Too Late," which starts, simply, with the words, "Mom, listen."  It's gorgeous and heartbreaking. 

Some of my favorite quotes from the various essays:

A young frontier gathers every sort of migrant, hope-chaser, roughneck, trickster, incompetent, misfit, and failure.  

There are two things that growing up on a belated western frontier gave me:  an acquaintance with the wild and wild creatures, and a delayed guilt in my part in their destruction.  

For two weeks at a time we might see no one but ourselves; and when our isolation was broken, it was generally broken by a lonesome Swedish homesteader who came over ostensibly to buy eggs, but more probably to hear the sound of a human voice.  We welcomed him.  We were as hungry for the sound of a human voice as he was.

I was full to the eyes with my region's physical, sensuous beauty, and submissive to its brutal weathers, and familiar, in ridicule or respect, with its drunken cowboys and its ranting newspaper editors and its limp English barristers incapable of any spoken syllable more complex than "Haw!"

It is not an unusual life-curve for Westerners - to live in and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space, clarity, and hopefulness of the West, to go away for study and enlargement and the perspective that distance and dissatisfaction can give, and then return to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment.   

How simple and memorable a good day can be when expectation is low!  

Aridity, more than anything else, gives the western landscape its character.  

You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.  

The West has had a way of warping well-carpentered habits, and raising the grain on exposed dreams.  

It should not be denied either, that being footloose has always exhilarated us.  It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led west. 

Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

I had read Barbara Comyn's Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead many years ago based on a suggestion at Green Apple Books, and the whimsical title Our Spoons Came from Woolworths caught my attention on a recent bookstore jaunt.  Comyns infuses both works with a sense of outlandishness and eccentricity, and a potent blend of the tragic and the comic.  Our Spoons Came from Woolworths tells the story of a young artist, Sophia Fairclough. who marries an artist named Charles, and becomes pregnant shortly thereafter.  Living a bohemian but spartan life in 1930s London, the young couple must navigate balancing artistic interests with familial responsibility, while living in poverty.  This is a novel that doesn't shy away from a woman's frank perspective on marriage and motherhood.  Fascinating, indeed.

Native American female voices

I recently read Gloria Steinem's memoir My Life on the Road, and in this book, she discusses her friendship with Wilma Mankiller, who was the first female chief of the Cherokee nation, and herself a highly inspirational and courageous person.  Mankiller edited and compiled various contemporary indigenous women's voices in her book entitled Every Day is a Good Day.  She asked women from different Native American backgrounds to comment on a variety of core themes, such as spirituality, sovereignty, love, traditions, and governance.  From ranchers and doctors, lawyers and activists, professors and artists, Mankiller captures a breadth of voices and in doing so, certain themes become illuminated, such as the importance of cultural survival, the emphasis on maintaining knowledge to pass on to future generations, the oppression and silencing of Native American culture, and the importance of sovereignty within indigenous nations.  A fascinating and important book.  I have added more books on Mankiller, in addition to several of the books she lists in her bibliography at the end of Every Day is a Good Day, to my reading list! 

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)!