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)!

My favorite book from January

My plan to read slim books in the month of January so as to start off the year by making a good dent in my "to read" list backfired to a certain extent, as I didn't find that many books that I'll remember or that had a great impact on me.  My favorite book from this past month was Larry Watson's Montana 1948, a short but great read that reminded me both of Ivan Doig and Richard Ford's writing. Told from the perspective of David Hayden, a boy coming of age in fictional Bentrock, Montana, the book explores themes of loyalty - to one's values, one's family, and one's job, and how these can create conflict within a nuclear family and a town.  I'm officially a Larry Watson fan now!

Not Under Forty

Willa Cather's collection of essays, Not Under Forty, starts off with a caveat that the essays would likely not appeal to those "under forty."  Nonetheless, I took a stab at it. Enjoyable and interesting of course, but not as wonderful for me as Cather's fiction. There was one quote that resonated with me:

"The unique charm of Mrs. Fields' house was not that it was a place where one could hear about the past, but that it was a place where the past lived on - where it was protected and cherished, had sanctuary from the noisy push of the present."

This last sentiment captures why I love Willa Cather so much, because when I read her work, it is indeed a sanctuary for me, as her writing hearkens back to an earlier time stripped away of distracting modernities, and instead focuses on the essence of relationships with oneself, others, and the landscapes that define us.  

Words on War

I recently read Tobias Wolff's memoir In Pharoah's Army as well as Phil Klay's collection of short stories, Redeployment.  It's fascinating to read these books within the same few weeks, as they both illustrate the effects of war and have many commonalities.  Wolff writes of his decision to enter the army, his experience in Vietnam, his relationship with his father, and his adjustment to life as a civilian.  Klay writes about Iraq and Afghanistan, and his stories focus on both being in the thick of daily life in a war zone, as well as what people's lives are like after returning from war.  Both Klay's debut and Wolff's memoir are very well written and engaging, and provide a great deal of insight into the intimate challenges faced by soldiers.  Recommended!

To Russia We Go

Published in 1948, A Russian Journal, by John Steinbeck, is his account of spending just over a month traveling in Russia at the beginning of the Cold War.  Steinbeck traveled with war photographer Robert Capa.  As Steinbeck explains in the book, his goal was to write about the lives of every day Russians, not to take a political or ideological stance, and ultimately has a very good experience there and enjoys his time with the generous and friendly Russian people he and Capa meet along the way.  In doing so, he reports about the various Russian cities and towns he visits, the food he eats, people's clothes and customs, and his experiencing traveling in planes, jeeps, etc. throughout the country.  The book captures Steinbeck's signature ability to write clearly to the heart of the matter, with no shortage of humor as well.  While this wasn't my favorite Steinbeck, it is an interesting one.  Some of my favorite passages:

"At last the plane took off, and as it did, a man sitting next to me opened his suitcase, cut off half a pound of raw bacon which was melting in the heat, and sat chewing it, the grease running down his chin.  He was a nice man, with merry eyes, and he offered me a piece, but I didn't feel like it at that moment."

"It was equipped with blades that were scissors, blades that were files, awls, saws, can-openers, beer-openers, corkscrews, tools for removing stones from a horse's foot, a blade for eating and a blade for murder, a screw driver and a chisel.  You could mend a watch with it, or repair the Panama Canal.  It was the most wonderful pocketknife anyone has ever seen, and we had it nearly two months, and the only thing we ever did with it was to cut sausages. But it must be admitted that the knife cut sausages very well."

"Our driver was, as usual, wonderful, an ex-cavalry man, and he had, of all things, a jeep.  The jeep does not bring out the best in anyone, and in a cavalry man it brings out the cowboy....He drove like a mad man, he was afraid of no one.  Again and again, in traffic, outraged drivers forced him to the curb, and there would be an exchange of violent Georgian language, and our man would smile and drive off.  He won all engagements.  We loved him."

Irish Anguish

I've wanted to read John McGahern's The Barracks for quite some time now - glad I finally got around to it.   The story centers around the life of Elizabeth Reegan, a woman who has lived a varied life but ends up back in the Irish village in which she grew up.  Married to her husband, a widower and a police officer who hates his job and wishes to be his own boss someday, she tends the home and takes care of his three children.  It's a bleak tale in which Ms. Reegan must fight for her life against breast cancer, and addresses the futility and fleeting freedoms of life.  This is an insular, unsparing book, and beautifully written.  Some compelling passages:

"He brought a wonderful ease with him sometimes into the house, the black hands of the clock would take wings."

"She was shackled, a thieving animal held at last in this one field."

"There never had been even any real discussion, not to speak of understanding, and while each of them alone was nothing there might be no knowing what both of them might find together." 

"Always easy to love something or somebody when you know you don't have to endure them anymore, when the goodbyes are being waved, and you can have your dream and choice of them instead of their solid, individual and demanding presence."