Summer Reading Pleasure

Once again, as my summer vacation begins, I am looking forward to guiltless reading time.  I have my stack (literal and figurative) of books I hope to enjoy this summer, but I know that all kinds of things happen to reshape the list. For now, I am working on The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce and The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout.  I'm also looking forward to Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Ann  Fowler and maybe even a re-read of The Great Gatsby since the movie's coming out.  I also have my eye on Kent Haruff's Benediction, since I loved Plainsong and Eventide so much.

In the meantime, though, I plan to catch up on reviews of several good reads I've enjoyed lately--not necessarily in the order in which I read them. One I must mention is Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter.  This book popped up on my reading radar, and I'm glad I read it.  The story takes place back and forth between 1962, when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were filming Cleopatra and beginning their on again, off again romance that led to more than one marriage.  The main characters, though, are Pasquale, a young Italian man who has inherited the family business, The Adequate View Hotel, in a sparsely populated, practically inaccessible location, and Dee Moray, a young actress who arrives by boat believing she's suffering from stomach cancer. Their stories intertwine with a number of characters,  Michael Deane, a big Hollywood figure about to venture into reality television, his discouraged assistant, a writer down on his luck ready to pitch a script based on the Donner party, and the son born to Dee after leaving Italy.

The novel is built on layers of stories--the characters' individual stories, the movie script, even the one chapter written by Alvis Bender, an American who comes to Pasquale's hotel each year to write--only working and reworking the single chapter.  A real bonus, though, is the material after the novel, including an interview with the author about how he wrote the novel and his own explanation of the long process (fifteen years) of writing this novel.  Walters' notes on the novel provide many valuable lessons for writers wanting to home the craft.  In fact, this novel is one I would suggest to my own students to "read like writers."

Stay tuned this week for the next in my "catching up" series.

Summer Reading Pleasure

In Memoriam

With one exam day  left (Monday) and grades due by noon Tuesday, I am working to keep my head above water (supply any of the cliche metaphors--light at the end of the tunnel, etc.).  I realize that I have quite a few books to review, so I'll start Tuesday or Wednesday playing catch up.  Today I am going a different direction here.

In the past few months, I have lost three former teachers that were mentors and friends to me.  Flora Hopper was my fifth and sixth grade teacher, after she retired from teaching high school Latin. I'm not sure what prompted the move. She told me in one of the many letters we exchanged after I became a teacher myself and thought to thank her for her influence, that she sat down with her husband every night after supper to learn just enough of the "New Math" in vogue that year  that she could teach us.  I remember so many things I learned in her class (none of it new math, by the way). We began each day with the pledge of allegiance first in English then in Latin (Videm meam obligo vexillo....).  My poem "Verbum Sapiente Sat Est" is about her too.  I remember that she gave us the freedom to be creative and collaborative long before either was academically fashionable.

Axel Wilhelm Swang was the Business Department Chair at Lipscomb during my tenure there as an accounting major.  I remember so many of his jokes that reinforced what he was teaching.  I know the number he had to forget in basic training. I'll never forget his wedding anniversary (Halloween). I know the correct answer was often "It depends."  I remember that the person with the class number 13 would be called on more often than anyone else.  In the years after graduation, my husband and I often visited Dr. Swang and his wife. They held the department Homecoming tea at their home until the school made other plans.  (Note that Homecoming has just about dwindled away from former graduates since then.)  His warmth when we returned meant so much to us.  I don't know if I can ride past his home on Tyne Blvd. without a twinge of sorrow and nostalgia.  The accounting degree didn't take with me, but I learned so many life lessons from him.

Dr. Bill Foster influenced me more than I can begin to describe.  While Mrs. Hopper and Dr. Swang lived to a ripe old age, Dr. Foster was much to young to go (in my humble opinion.)  He served as English department chair when I returned for my real career, and he ended up hiring me as an adjunct faculty member after I graduated, as I took one more class to get in my 18 hours.  I took him for every class I could--linguistics, folklore, grammar.  I missed out on his Shakespeare class, and even though I had a great professor, I know I missed something special there too.

I never could call him Bill, even when we worked together.  I saw him last when I happened to be in town when the UNA storytelling festival was held.  I was thrilled to see one of my favorites, Donald Davis.  In the weeks that followed, I got a (handwritten) note from Dr. Foster, who had attended the funeral service for Alabama's best-known storyteller, Kathryn Windham Tucker, officiated by Davis.

This week, I responded to an unusual request from a poet friend on facebook. She needed someone to diagram an 84-word sentence, cast in legalese.  It took me a couple of days, and the final draft took three long sheet of paper.  I had learned from the best.  In Dr. Foster's class, if I remember correctly, our final exam was a Faulkner sentence.  I wish I had the chance to tell him I am still using what I learned from him-- every day.

In Memoriam

Time for Some Short Stories

Since I teach literature, I tend to read short stories one at a time, rarely reading a whole collection by the same author at one time, which is a shame.  Recently, I read Junot Diaz's recent collection This Is How You Lose Her and George Saunders' Tenth of December.

I had read Diaz before; in fact, I think my book club may have read his nove The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  I've even heard rumors that he may be part of a writers series here in my part of the world next (school) year.  The short stories were separate, stand-alone stories, but with some overlap, some characters, particularly Yunior, reappearing in later stories, and all were set in and around New Jersey. The main characters are Dominican immigrants, and Diaz's language is steeped in the flavor his his culture. His characters, often flawed, deal not simply with the immigrant experience, but with the human experience, particularly the loss of love.

Tenth of December, Saunder's collection, is more loosely connected.  Some of the stories are set in the real world, while others are certain imbued by fantasy, sometimes little enough that those elements sneak up on readers.  The opening story "Victory Lap" brought to my mind Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are Your Going? Where Have You Been?" without being the least bit derivative.  The title story, which closes the collection, follows two lives that coincide, a dying man attempting to end his life and a young misfit of a boy, out walking and wishing to be a hero, who nearly loses his own life trying to save the man.  Between these two, all the characters seem to wrestle with their idea of living with "moral courage," an elusive trait indeed.

I realize that one of things I like best about reading a collection of short stories is the quick payoff. I can finish a single story in a short time (I think Poe prescribed one sitting), but then if I want more, there they are.  I can also postpone the agonizing decision of what to read next.  For now, that decision is pressing. I have two novels I can't wait to read, but while I'm in short story mode, it's time for Ron Rash's Nothing Gold Can Stay.

Time for Some Short Stories

I mentioned in an earlier post that I bought the first of Alan Bradley's Flavia de Luce novels, Sweetness in the Bottom of the Pie, simply because I liked the cover. So much for that old axiom, eh? I even took awhile to get started reading it, but then I shared it with my mom, not only a voracious reader, but a speed reader (with great comprehension), which I envy.

I also don't necessarily gravitate toward series books, sometimes resenting the pull to read the next and the next.  In some cases, I'm glad I did. (Prime example, Harry Potter).  In other cases, I can certainly resist (Twilight). These books, though, manage to stand alone, but having read the previous novels, I feel that sense of satisfaction and familiarity: these are people I already know.

I will admit that I have enjoyed many a book with a young narrator.  Despite the advise one of my writer friends was given against using a young protagonist, I could make a long list of such books that I have loved. Aware I am dealing in cliches, I would still call Flavia de Luce charming and delightful.  She's an eleven-year-old, the youngest of three daughters of a father raising them alone after losing their mother Harriet on an adventure in Tibet.  He is also edging book-by-book closer to losing the family's once-grand home because of financial strains.

Once again, in this novel Speaking from Among the Bones, a murder occurs, and of course, Flavia lands right in the middle of the action.  In the meantime, the grave of Saint Tancred, the patron saint of Bishop's Lacey, the little parish where they live, is to be exhumed for their five hundred anniversary of the church. Flavia proves such an ideal narrator, both naive and self aware.  She  is drawn to trouble and can't avoid the temptation to torment her older sisters, though she melts with the least sign of warmth from them.

Bradley's secondary characters, the church officials, the employees in the home, the neighbors, and the law officers, are colorful and endearing.

Somehow I had the mistaken idea that this was the last in the series.  I should have known better. After my mother finished the book (before me, of course), she asked more than once if I had read it yet.  Not until I reached the end did I understand why she asked.  I won't explain. First you need to read the books--all of them--yourself!

Leaving Tuscaloosa

I'm a sucker for a reference to my old stomping groups, so when I was at the bookstore in Southern Pines for Wiley Cash's reading, my ears perked up when I heard mention of an author coming in the next week or two, Walter Bennett, the author of Leaving Tuscaloosa.  Interestingly, I learn that while Bennett is a native of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, he now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  Now we share all my sports loyalty locales.

The novel, though, is not a light, breezy Southern read. It's a painful story of racial discrimination and even hatred in the early days of the Civil Rights movement.  The story actually covers only a couple of days, but the events that transpire are earthshaking.  First, one of the main characters, Richebeaux (Bo) Branscomb, is the former high school pitcher who quit the team after hurting a batter, following the coach's orders.  Living with his mother and stepfather, alienated from his father, his options for the future look slim.  He is dating Mem, a popular girl from an affluent family who, he realizes, will be leaving soon for some prestigious university "up North."

The second story line follows Acee, a young black man who once played with Bo in the lumberyard when the two were young, before his father put a stop to their friendship.  Acee's brother Raimond has been stirring up trouble, unwilling to put up with the treatment of blacks in their hometown. Two deaths that occur the same night--the black minister, who dies of a heart attack after becoming the target of the white teenagers' pranks, and the deputy sent to Raimond's house to "check on him," shot to death--set both the white and black community into a frenzy.

The novel dredges up images of the segregated South at its worst, but it also manages to maintain a strong chord of hope in a handful of the young people who are willing to take risks to do what their conscience says is right. Walker manages to draw readers to characters who are complex, torn between loyalties, facing moral dilemmas with no simple resolutions. 

It's a story that will leave readers uncomfortable and restless, grateful for the changes that have taken place over the last seveal decades, hopeful that more positive change will come, even if it happens one friendship at a time.

Leaving Tuscaloosa

Perspective

We have an on-going discussion in the English department where I teach when we choose a common novel to be read in the English classes during a semester.  Should we choose a novel set in our region, giving our students--many of them reluctant readers--the chance to read a story set in their own familiar territory or should we choose a novel set in another part of the world, letting them become vicarious travelers to places they might not otherwise come to know. In the past, we had chosen Mountains beyond Mountains, the story of Dr. Paul Farmer's work in Haiti. Shortly after, when the devastating earthquake hit that island nation, our students had a  genuine connection and concern.

Since we usually choose a novel in the Spring by our visiting author for the Writers Symposium, the selection is sometimes narrowed by necessity. This spring, for instance, we are reading Wiley Cash's highly successful first novel A Land More Kind than Home, and students are certainly responding positively, even the self-professed nonreaders.

Having just finished Chris Cleave's novel Little Bee, another book that had sad quite awhile on my shelf before I made the time to explore its story, I now lean toward that virtual travel option.  The voice Cleave creates and the story he tells made me think about international immigration issues in a different way.  I've taught long enough to have had lots of experience with students new to this country, often not by their own choice.  I know from their own stories that they were not coming here simply for economic prosperity; many families fled political oppression and life-threatening persecution.

In the novel, Little Bee is a sixteen-year-old Nigerian girl who has spent the last two years trying to stay under the radar at a detention center near London.  A paperwork "mistake" orchestrated by a Jamaican detainee sets Little Bee, the Jamaican, and two other young women free--but without paperwork and with nowhere to go, a microcosm of the United Nations, they joke.

She finds her way to the home of a family she met on the beach in Nigeria, an encounter whose details are revealed bit by bit in the narrative, gaining impact.  Her arrival coincides with the suicide of Andrew O'Roark, and she goes that first day with his wife and young son to his funeral.  The story is told alternately by Little Bee and by Sara, O'Roark's wife, the editor of a trendy magazine published in London.  Their son Charlie is going through a phase pretending to be Batman and refusing to wear anything but his costume so he can "fight baddies."

Little Bee's experiences from the detention center, where she realizes she either needs to be beautiful or to know English to survive--and chooses English, on her journey to Kingston on the Thames, and the back story in Nigeria, are heartbreaking. I was awestruck by her cool, calculating mind as she constantly surveys her changing environment, looking for the best way to kill herself if "the men come." 

The book is a story or survival and of sacrifice, and the characters are forced to make life-changing, momentous decisions at a moment's notice.  I suspect that Little Bee's voice will remain in my ear as the immigration debates continue.  I  realize how many difficulties arise when procedure meets individuals.

Perspective

Brick and Mortar intersects with Google

Classic irony, I suppose, that I am still thinking about this audiobook days after I finished it, in part because I want to find a copy of the book to help answer a few questions.  I'll admit I chose the book because it mentions a bookstore in the title.  The story itself follows Clay Jannon, a young man who ends up working the night shift at a strange bookstore, located next to a strip join, where he discovers that the few strange patrons are not actually purchasing the books on the low shelves in the front but are borrowing the books accessible only by ladder in the tall narrow space in the back.

Clay puts his computer skills to the test and discovers patterns to their book requests.  On his own, he tries to build business with some online ads, drawing only one potential customer--and this is where I need the print copy. I have no idea how any of the names are spelled. (Confession, I even had to look online for Clay's last name.  I'm going phonetic from this point on. Check my spelling.  I dare you) Cat Potente, a devoted Google employee who becomes his girlfriend and his partner on an adventure that leads to a five-hundred-year-old cult seeking answer, possibly answers to immortality, based on the life and the Codex left behind by a sixteenth century printer.

The plot was engaging, but I kept finding myself wanting to find other answers.  Is Gerritszoon the name of a real font? (Answer: Yes, it is.)  Are any of the other historical figures real? (Not sure yet.)  Is the representation of the Google culture accurate?  (I'm VERY curious to find out.)  What was the significance of the last text message Clay sent Cat (re: 25,000 miles)?  That's what I'm googling next!

I had already read of Google's project to convert all print books to digital, so the author had my buy-in there.  I especially loved the conclusion implicit in the novel: Those who love books, words, even individual letters, don't have to choose between one of the other.  It is perfectly acceptable to simultaneously enjoy paper and ink, digital format, and audio. (Whew! What a relief, since I already do!)  I also appreciated the irony that a simple, low-tech process not only succeeded where five hundred years of scholarship had failed but also at what all of Google's channeled resources could not accomplish.  At least for the time being, my world of books is safe and in good hands.

Brick and Mortar intersects with Google