Favorite Books for 2005

It is New Year's Eve. My husband and I had a band for many years and always played on New Year's Eve. So now we don't even think about leaving the house on this night. We are about to watch "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", having had a lovely home cooked dinner.

So it seems that the blog has become my performance venue for the time being. My gig tonight is to present to you, dear readers, my favorite books for 2005. I only read 109 books this year which is down from last year and my lowest since 2001. I am not sure why because it sure seems like I read continuously, but I do know that I read a heap of books that were over 500 pages long.

I usually try to limit my list to a TOP 10, but I couldn't do it this year. In spite of reading less, I had more favorite books and I see that as some kind of a good sign. So here they are, in order of when I read them. I am not giving any summaries here. You can go and see for yourself if you are interested. They are all available at public libraries. Let me know if you've read any and what you thought. I would also love to read your top favorites list and encourage you to post it as a comment here so others can see it as well.

Happy New Year and Happy Reading!

THE LIST

1. Raintree County, Ross Lockridge, Jr
2. The Great Fire, Shirley Hazzard
3. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
4. Spending, Mary Gordon
5. Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
6. The Crimson Petal and the White, Michel Faber
7. The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson
8. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
9. The Dangerous Husband, Jane Shapiro
10. The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
11. The Known World, Edward P Jones
12. Weetzie Bat, Francesca Lia Block
13. Absolute Friends, John le Carre
14. Heir to the Glimmering World, Cynthia Ozick
15. No Country For Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
16. The Song of Names, Norman Lebrecht
17. Gonzales & Daughter Trucking Co, Maria Amparo Escandon

Guest Blogger

I am honored to have a guest blogger today: my son Noah, who has the day off and is visiting me. He has a gift, as you will see. Please enjoy this Christmas tale composed by Noah for his nieces and nephews, my grandchildren.

Merry Christmas from your Uncle Noah! It is the middle of the night here in LA and I just ran into Santa Claus. He was dropping off gifts near where I live and as I was walking home, I saw him stuck on a roof next to my apartment building. He had just delivered to the children in that building. His sleigh and reindeer were trying to take off but could not. The problem was simple: NO SNOW and way too hot!! So the reindeer were over-heated cause they were trying to pull the sleigh on rocks instead of snow. I did not know what to do. I called the North Pole and spoke to the Chief Elf. He told me there was nothing I could do. So I went back to my office and did a Google search: "Santa" "LA" "Stuck" "NO SNOW". Only 1,333,658,452,652 came up in 0.0000275 seconds. I searched all of them and only found one of them with the solution I needed. It was the 1,333,658,452,652nd of them.

It was a guy named Wilbur. Was born in Idaho, the northern part, where it gets real cold in the winter. He does heating and cooling out here in LA, but never has any heating business because it never really gets cold enough in LA to turn the heat on. So he told me I had to make the roof where Santa was stuck cold enough so it would snow on that roof. I asked him how the heck I was going to do that. He told me he had a cousin Jasper that lives in Idaho, the northest part, where it gets REALLY COLD!!! He owns an ice cutting business where they cut ice out of the frozen lakes and ship it down to Las Vegas.

He told me that for just a few dollars more per pound of ice and per extra mile driven, I could get Jasper to bring me the ice I needed to make smow for Santa to take off. I was so happy I had a solution. I called Jasper on his 800 hot-line: 1-800-JUST-ICE, ICE BABY!!! Jasper picked up and I told him my story and that his cousin Wilbur told me to call him. He was very happy to hear from me, as he was kinda worried and all. You know, manning a hot line every year for the last 25 years on Christmas eve night, he got used to seeing Santa come by every year to drop off the presents. But when he heard my story, he knew exactly what had happened to Santa.

Jasper told me he could get 50 tons of ice to my address right away. So I gave him my credit card and he ran it. Only $2.99 a pound for the ice. Good thing I have an Amex card! He gave me my receipt number and told me ice was on the way. Then he told me it would get there on the 27th of December as Monday was a holiday.

Now what does that mean for you, my nieces and nephew? It means your presents won't be arriving from Santa tonight. There has been a delay. The presents (and there are lots of them) won't leave LA until the 27th of December and won't arrive in Cincinnati until after the New Year. But don't be sad my loves. Just think of it this way: When Christmas is over and the New Year has arrived, there will be more cool gifts that you will be getting from the coolest Uncle in all of LA: UNCLE NOAH!!!

MERRY HAPPY BLESSED

The creator sent a man with a message
It was simple: love one another, he said
We in our complexity began the fragmentation
Naming every different kind of love instead
We have young love, tough love
Love at first sight, love gone wrong
A mother's love, a secret love
The love of the poets, a sad love song
Now each year we send cards with messages
And I ponder what I want to say
We celebrate this special season once a year
We need to love one another everyday.

GONZALES & DAUGHTER TRUCKING CO

Gonzales & Daughter Trucking Co, by Maria Amparo Escandon, Random House, Inc, 2005, 285 pp.

This was a reading group pick and an example of a book I might never have found otherwise. I really liked it! The subtitle is: A Road Novel with Literary License. Libertad Gonzales is the daughter of two truckers whose mother died at Libertad's birth and who was raised by her father while riding the Interstates in his 18 wheeler.

Now Libertad is serving time in a Mexican prison and consumed with guilt, but she is unable to reveal her crime to her fellow inmates at the Mexicali Penal Institution for Women. She comes across an old paperback and begins reading aloud, but what comes out is not the story in the book but her own story. The other women are largely illiterate, so Libertad forms The Library Club and "reads" to them everyday. Thus you learn her history and at the very end, her crime.

The prison, its inmates and staff reminded me of Pen Pals by Olivia Goldsmith. It is a complex scenario of graft, rehab and sorority. The trucker characters are larger than life and the author even provides a glossary of trucker lingo. The book itself touches on feminism, parenting, coming of age, teen issues and also has a dash of magical realism. Quite an accomplishment in a novel that keeps you turning the pages and reads like a bestseller. Highly recommended for teens, adults, men and women.

Blogging as a discipline

As usual, I have been absent from the blogosphere for many days. I make deals with myself that I will blog daily mainly because "they" say that one needs to post regularly in order to keep people coming to one's blog. Then the other day, I read on someone else's blog that it was a good way to get into the discipline of meeting deadlines and writing regularly. It all sounds good, but I am basically a slacker when it comes to discipline. Lord knows there are way too many things one must do daily in life: brush your teeth, get dressed, eat, clean up the kitchen, to mention just a few. Then there are weekly chores such as laundry, grocery shopping, cleaning the house. Finally there are the really annoying things like going to work at a certain time whether you feel like it or not, driving in freeway traffic, making the bank deposit, blah, blah, blah. So why would I want to make blogging and writing a regualrly scheduled duty when I do it for fun, for the joy of creating?

Well yesterday I was reading Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing and he says that writing that 1000 words a day is the way you learn to write. Somewhere on a blog yesterday I read that Ray is credited with the opinion that a writer needs to write 1,ooo,ooo words before he or she gets any good at all. (At 1000 words a day, that is about three years.) I am sure it is all true. I go on marathons where I promise all the gods that I WILL WRITE 1000 WORDS A DAY. It does not ever last.

What I am trying to say is that if you are a visitor to my blog, I am so glad to have you. Please check back from time to time. I read two to three books a week (that is one thing that does not ever feel like discipline to me, but most always feels like a guilty pleasure), so I doubt that I will run out of books to blog about for a long time, if ever. Then there will be the occasional chapter from the book I am usually not writing. But if you want a daily dose, you won't find it here. Luckily there are countless blogs where you can get that, so I don't have to feel obligated to provide it.

While I am on the subject, I just have to mention that I am puzzled by lit bloggers who merely mention interesting articles that they read elsewhere or post other bloggers posts. Don't these people have anything to do? Do they find this fun? Do they actually ever read all the books they talk about? Well, I don't want to get too snarky here, but I do think that "literary" people ought to be reading more than anything else, unless they are writing their 1000 words everyday, in which case they could be excused from reading once in a while. I have a writer friend (who is a regular here at Keep The Wisdom and I thank her for that), who doesn't read anything while she is writing a book. She wants to be sure her ideas are her own. I respect that totally, although I can't imagine going without reading for long enough to write a whole book.

Those are my thoughts today, Christmas Eve day. Oh, one more. Currently I am reading My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk. I haven't been able to get up to speed on this book yet, because it takes place in Turkey in the sixteenth century and I have never read a book set in Turkey. I feel like a very unprepared tourist so far. But what has struck me as I read is that there are so very many ways to live a life. I live in the outskirts of Los Angeles, a town which tries to convince you that there is only one way to live. I was born and raised as a middle class American, a culture which has quite limited approved ways to live. In Pamuk's book we have a cast of characters who are artists who illustrate books; calligraphers, miniaturists, colorists, etc. They go through long years of apprenticeship, their lives are fraught with the vagaries of political and religious upheavals, they become bent and blind doing this type of work. But it is what they love, it is their passion. So it is with writers. Even the most disciplined and dedicated writers lead lives of financial uncertainty and social ineptitude for the most part. I was filled with admiration and gratitude to all the writers who keep on writing and putting together books for me to read. I wanted to give them a special holiday party where they could just come in any old clothes, without a shower if they wished and sit around feeling relaxed, not having to be brilliant for a few hours, just eat and drink and talk about whatever, but feel honored and adored for the wonderful creatures they are.

READING FOR MY LIFE: 1940

A couple months ago, I completed reading through my lists of books for the decade 1940-1949; the first stage of MY BIG FAT READING PROJECT (see earlier posts in the archives.) The project consists of reading the top ten bestsellers of each year plus a selected list of other books, with the purpose of getting an understanding of each year as portrayed in books, as well as to see how the literature and events of these years influenced me, my life, my search for truth, enlightenment and understanding about life. I was born in 1947, but I started reading the books of 1940 to get a feel for the times I was born into.

I have already learned more than could have imagined from this reading. I have found out more than I ever knew I didn't know about World War II. I have discovered how earnest and wholesome many people were in the 1940s; that Christianity made for bestsellers back then; that war and the Industrial Revolution, communism and socialism were beginning to erode all those values and to create chaos. It has been a fascinating study made through fiction.

In 1940, my parents were in college, finishing their junior year and starting their senior year. Here is some background on my family:

My ancestors on both sides are all German. My father's great-great-grandfather was born in 1775 in the Duchy of Brunswick, part of the German kingdom called Hanover. His family were farmers and had lived there for centuries. There is possibly some Swedish blood in the family and we certainly have a proportion of blonde-haired, blue-eyed family members. This ancestor of my father was a soldier from the age of 16 and although he was illiterate, he could speak six languages, including German, Dutch, Low German, some English and a little Swedish. He settled in Osnabruck (still in Hanover) and married a tenant farmer's daughter. They had 5 children, three of whom lived. The youngest of these was my father's great-grandfather who was named Balthasar Henry, but was known as Willie.

Willie became a spinner of flax and a tailor, but the cotton that was being imported from America took over from flax and put Willie out of business. In 1837, he sailed with many other German emigrants from the North Sea and arrived in Baltimore, MD on July 4. From there he walked to Pittsburgh, PA in ten days. Although he had intended to go to Cincinnati, OH, he was tired of walking and stayed in Pittsburgh. About six years later, after establishing himself as a tailor and opening his own shop, he married. He was 32 and his new wife was 22. They had three sons and three daughters. The youngest son, born August 3, 1854 and named William was my father's grandfather. He also became a tailor.

William married a preacher's daughter and had nine children, the eighth of which was my grandfather, Ernest August, born in 1892 and a third generation American. He married the daughter of a grocery store owner. Two of his brothers married my grandmother's sisters. Ernest and my grandmother lived in her childhood home at first, a tradition that would continue when my parents married and lived in my father's childhood home until my first sister was about to be born. My dad's parents were church-going Lutherans and heavy drinkers. My grandmother did not learn to drive until around the time I was born and I recall her riding the brake down the many hills of Pittsburgh. My grandfather was an accountant and went to work everyday on the streetcar, as did my father when I was an infant and toddler.

This side of my family had several ministers, some alcoholics and some who went insane. Both of my grandparents were alcoholics and my father probably was too, though he got sober in his late 50s and remained so to the end of his life. My father was highly intelligent, deeply spiritual and totally committed to the family. He died of Alzheimer's leading to pneumonia at the age of 84, but could still sing all the old hymns and Christmas carols as well as harmonize to anyone else's singing.

Less is known about my mother's family. She is still living and in her words, her family never talked about anything. Her ancestors were also German but there is little information that anyone remembers about when they came to this country. Her grandfather Charles, married Mathilda, who came to the United States when she was eight years old. These great-grandparents of mine lived in Fraser, Michigan, near Detroit. My grandfather on this side of the family, also named Charles, was born March 16, 1887. He had two brothers and one sister. At some point the family moved to Port Hope, Michigan, a small town in the thumb district right on Lake Michigan. Grandpa married Emma, one of seven children from a farming family near Port Hope. His sister married Howard Smith, a banker and co-owner of the hardware store in Port Hope. My grandfather eventually took over that hardware store and ran it until the Depression in the 1930s. After their first child was born in 1915, he and my grandmother bought a house on M25, facing Lake Michigan. We visited that house every summer of my childhood.

Grandpa worked all his life but he was at heart a musician, liked to play drums in local bands and to have a good time. He was always frustrated at working jobs that did not use his musical talents. My grandmother was a fearful woman who was terrified of storms, never drove a car and hated the telephone. She was a prolific gardener and an excellent cook but not much fun to be around. She had four children but was often in poor health due to a bad back, though she lived to be 93. My mother was the second child and when she was three years old, was sent to live with Aunt Lydia and Uncle Howard. Grandma was done in by the birth of my mom's sister and Aunt Lydia had lost her only daughter at the age of eight. Mom thought she was going for a week, but she never went back home to live, only to visit on weekends. After the hardware store failed in the Depression, times were tight and my mother used to tell us how she only had two dresses for school. She wore one for a week and the other for the next week. This story was usually told when I would clamor for new clothes. She did not get along well with her aunt, who was a bitter and critical woman, but she loved Uncle Howard, who recovered financially and paid for her college education.

Although my mother was a year older than my father, she skipped one grade during school and my father skipped two, so they both arrived as freshmen at Valparaiso University in Indiana in 1937. This was and still is a Lutheran school and my father was sent there on his parent's money supplemented by a scholarship from a Lutheran insurance company. He wrote for the university paper, drank heavily with fraternity brothers and sang in the choir. My mother majored in music education, studied organ and also sang in the choir, which is where they met.

In 1940, they were not yet a couple. Though the war was raging in Europe, it did not have much effect on college life. Germany took Norway, Denmark, Holland and France that year and were being bombed by England, but the United States was not yet involved. In fact there was quite a lot a sentiment in this country against having anything to do with Europe's troubles. President Roosevelt however was all for getting involved and there was a lot of stirring up about how democracy and the American way of life was at risk. Actually it probably was at that point and still is. By the end of the year, Roosevelt had pushed through Congress lots of money for armaments, started a draft to build up the military, exchanged destroyers with England and got us a bunch of naval bases all around Europe and Africa. He also got re-elected for a third term.

In the literature I read for 1940, there is a preponderance of books about war and the message is clearly that war is not a solution. I was mildly surprised at first to find the writers of fiction to be almost unanimously against war. There is also a strong religious theme in many of these books. God is alive and well in America of 1940. (For the list of books I read, see my post of October 30, 2005.)

Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, won the Pulitzer Prize. There were no Nobel prizes that year due to the war. In those days, those were the only big awards for literature.

In film, Gone With the Wind won Best Picture, Best Director (Victor Fleming) and Best Actress (Vivien Leigh). Goodbye Mr Chips, based on a book by James Hilton, won Best Actor (Robert Donat). Popular songs were: You Are My Sunshine, How High the Moon, When You Wish Upon A Star and Blueberry Hill.

Technological developments that year included the building of the cyclotron at the University of California, which allowed scientists to split atoms; the development of a form of penicillin practical for treating infection; the first combustion chamber for jet engines, the first electron microscope and the first successful helicopter flight. Whether they realized it or not, science was setting the stage for the most destructive war mankind had ever known.

What I see in the literature is a clinging to the old answers such as religion and family with the creeping in of decay, evil and breakdown. While the writers are not pro war, the readers want to be reassured that there is something to fight for and, as always, to be entertained. The people I came from were trying to get an education and better themselves, to rise above farming and blue collar professions, to keep the arts in their lives and to follow their religion. My father wanted to be a teacher and my mother a musician. They loved classical music and were both readers. For thinking men and women and for writers, it was a time of trying to come to terms with war, with struggles for freedom and equality and with finding a way to achieve the goals of mankind without mass killing.

When an individual wants power and is not himself in very good shape, he can go to the not-haves and rile them up and get them to fight for some better future life, because they have nothing to lose. Nor do they have the education or intelligence to see that they are being duped and merely used for the empowerment and enrichment of a few unscrupulous individuals. That has been going on for eons, but in the early 20th century the rise of communism and fascism was happening along with the beginnings of a new era of struggles for equality and independence amongst the downtrodden. I can see influences in the literature that could have led to my interest in the underdog, the unfortunate and the forgotten of the world. Of course, those ideas also came from my Christian upbringing, especially as taught to me by my parents, but I found that the poor, the immigrant, Blacks, Jews, women and basically all the oppressed were in the literature and minds of Americans in 1940.

The voices in these books are distinct even if they are from the same time. Richard Llewellyn is romantic, Christopher Morely ironic, Hemingway is earnest and even optimistic, Sholem Asch is dreary (of course he was also Polish), Kenneth Roberts is a bit stuffy and know-best and Steinbeck is downright spiritual. Yet all the books so far are about the plight of man and his dreams and how he adapts to change. The haves against the have-nots is a common theme as well as war. Also there are the able versus the not able, the trustworthy, hardworking types versus the riffraff, yet among the riffraff are those occasional creatures who are wily, adventurous and actually keep the others in tea and cakes or fight their battles for them.

The theme of change and what happens to those who can't deal with it is a major theme in my life, which I suppose began with the Industrial Revolution. As far as being American goes, I come from people who desired change, to whom the status quo was intolerable, who came to this country with hopes and dreams and who had the incredible work ethic necessary to make it in a new land and culture.

While reading a couple of the more frivolous books, I was thinking about how there was this terrible war going on in Europe, the Germans are just taking over countries and slaughtering people, while Americans are trying to pretend that it isn't happening and has nothing to do with them. They are buying and reading love stories while talking about how bad things are in Europe. It seemed incredible to me, but then I thought about how after 9/11, some award shows got cancelled and the Spider Man movie wasn't released because it had the Twin Towers in it and people were all upset and flying flags on their cars, but in just a few months they were mostly bored with it and the economy was going from bad to worse and really people were worried about money. The best sellers, such as The Nanny Diaries, which was a bunch of gossip about rich people, just kept selling.

I guess war is just unconfrontable. They sure have to do a lot of propaganda and PR and advertising to get people fired up enough to take an actual interest. At least that is what I have seen from reading history. A war is going on, maybe for years and years, but most people still go to work or farm or whatever and try to stay alive like they always do. If the war actually comes through where they live it is damn inconvenient, but life goes on. Babies get born and people have to eat and they always want some entertainment. Maybe there are scarcities and rationing but people make do and get by. Then when the war is over, the soldiers that didn't die come home and are shellshocked or hardened or Agent Oranged, but things go back to normal after a while and there is even usually some kind of economic boom.

When I was in college in the 60s and then after I dropped out and became a hippy, all I knew was that some guys went to Vietnam, some peoples' relatives got killed (no one I actually knew though) and we just protested and helped guys get out of the draft. Meanwhile we were learning macrobiotics and getting high and listening to our favorite music, while there were guys over there dying. I think we didn't feel we had to care about those guys because we knew you could get out of going if you even tried and we thought guys who went were stupid, straight Hawks and had no respect for them. To this day, I have never known personally anyone who fought in Vietnam. My ex-boyfriend enlisted, which we thought was the stupidest thing of all, because it meant you agreed with the war and believed all that hogwash about fighting communism.

It sounds really cold to me now and I wonder how I became such a cynic. I didn't really know much about history or what was really going on in Vietnam or how we got involved. I just knew that I thought war was wrong, that I was a pacifist and I just was not going to participate. I wonder how many people in the 40s felt that way until they got shamed into or excited into taking part in it. I bet there was heavy pressure to be "patriotic" and if you weren't something was weird about you, especially if you were German or Japanese. I wonder how my parents really felt about it.

My parents grew up with parents who had lived through World War I, either safely from here or who had friends and relatives who fought or who fought themselves. My parents were born just as that war ended and by the time they were young man and woman, there was another world war. And I was born just after that one was over. But really it wasn't talked about, it wasn't stressed. It was the space race and learning science to keep up with the Russians and Eisenhower and peace and prosperity; subdivisions and cars and money and getting ahead and cocktail parties. Mostly in my family it was church and giving money to the church and to unfortunate orphans and being good and staying away from disreputable people and being safe.

Maybe it worked. When I was in my 20s there was Vietnam and when I was in my 40s there was Desert Storm and now there is the "war on terror", but no more world wars, at least not yet. Maybe that atom bomb really did scare people enough. Now war is more localized and more covert and done with money and marketing and hostile takeovers. Still the poor get squeezed out and the rich stay rich and the middle class does all the work that isn't grunt work and on we go.

Doing the reading, it was at times extremely weird to be so much in another entire decade. The writers and readers of that time were somewhat obsessed with the coming war, the changes in society and how to make sense of it all, while in today's world we take all that for granted. The themes of independence, preserving a way of life that includes liberty and material plenty but at the same time the concern for the elements of society who are poor, suppressed, etc portray the beginnings of socialism and communism as almost acceptable instead of abhorrent ideas. It did not seem as polarized as it does today, but more like an awakening of consciousness to the whole world situation.

Patriotism and nationalism are concepts that have never done much for me. In fact, I feel a distaste for those ideas because they lead to war, to justifications of war and armaments and to an emphasis on the differences between segments of the human race. I suppose any country has its allies and enemies and has to figure out how to work harmoniously with the allies and how to defend itself against its enemies. But somehow between that decade when I was born and my young adult years, it got very muddled. By the time I went to college, I was against war, racism, imperialism, economic oppression. Of course, I don't think I was in the majority of American thought, but I am so curious to discover how I became so anti-establishment, so enamored of the hippy ideals of the brotherhood of man and so dedicated to ending war on this planet. As I continue this reading adventure, I plan to discover the answers to all that.

DREAMS FROM MY FATHER

Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama, Random House, Inc, 1995, 453 pp.

I read this for one of my reading groups. Being the non-political person that I am, I was completely unaware of who this person is, but my very political girlfriend filled me in. Obama is currently a US Senator from Illinois and a hot guy in the Democratic party these days. After reading his memoir, I am a supporter. He has a fine sense of integrity and understanding about people though I fear that the political process in this country would kill that off in even the strongest individual.

In the early 90s, Obama was studying law at Harvard and became the first Black man to be elected as President of the Harvard Law Review. The publicity engendered by this event brought him a publishing offer, so he wrote this story of his life up to that point. After winning the seat in the US Senate, the book was republished.

Obama's mother was a white woman from Kansas, whose family moved to Hawaii when she was a teenager. There at the University of Hawaii, she met an African student from Kenya. They married and had Barack in the early 60s. But the father left when Barack was only 2 years old to get his PhD at Harvard, because his scholarship money was not enough to support a wife and child. Before he could complete his degree, he was summoned back to Kenya by his government and the marriage dissolved due to time and distance.

So Barack was raised by his white mother and grandparents while his father took on the quality of a myth. When Barack was ten years old, his father came for a two week visit which only served to confuse Barack further. But he managed to complete highschool and college, by which time he had decided to live as a Black man.

After college, he went to Chicago to work as a community organizer in the ghettos of South Chicago and came face to face with the results of racism in a northern industrial city. Just before entering Harvard Law School, he finally traveled to Kenya and met his father's side of the family, finding at last the other half of his heritage.

It was a fascinating book, written in a novelist's style and hard to put down. It added much to my growing fund of knowledge about Blacks in this country, their African forebears, racism and the long slow climb of the Black race in America from slaves to full citizens of this country; a climb which is far from over.

I doubt that this country is ready to elect a Black President, but I am sure it will happen in my lifetime. If Obama can stay in politics and maintain the integrity he displays in his book, I would be glad to have him as President of the United States.

WHERE HAVE I BEEN?

I haven't posted for about three weeks and my apologies to anyone who stopped by looking for something new. On November 20, I got a killer flu, which luckily didn't kill me. It just put me to bed for a few days. I managed to get well in time to travel to Michigan for Thanksgiving with my extended family. I also managed to gain back all the weight I lost when I was too sick to eat. Ah well.

Then I returned home and went back to work. I am a teacher and my class was in tatters from 3 days with a substitute, so that is my excuse for last week. Just too exhausted at the end of the day to do anything but flop onto the couch and read. But nothing keeps me from reading and I've got lots of books to blog about. I also have worked on the first installment or whatever (I can't decide what to call it) from the Big Fat Reading Project.

Just a few comments on that. I have all these notes I have kept while reading and all my summaries of the books plus other info, but when I try to put this together in some readable form, it seems to lose all its life and become dry and boring. So I am struggling with that. If any readers here are writers and have run into a similar problem, I would be so grateful to hear of your experiences and how you solved it. I hope to have something posted by the end of this weekend, but it may take until the Christmas break from school to get it done. Thanks for your patience.

One other item: I am currently reading The Wall, by John Hersey. It is catagorized as fiction but comes across as fact. I spent an hour searching the web today to get some info and came up with virtually nothing. Does anyone have background data on this book? I am about 190 pages into it and am finding it good, not gripping, but heavy going. It is about Jews being enclosed into a ghetto in Warsaw in 1939-1943. I understand that there is an uprising near the end but right now it is just disturbing to the point of depressing. The things that humans do to each other are just a bit much.

WAITING

Waiting, by Ha Jin, Random House, Inc, 1999, 308pp

I've had this book on my shelf for a while. It won an NBA and a PEN/Faulkner award, so I had high expectations which unfortunately were not met.

The story is set in 1960s-1980s China, which is post-revolutionary Red China. Lin Kong is a doctor in an army hospital. He is married to a woman he does not love. The marriage was arranged by his parents and his wife remains in the small village where Lin Kong was raised along with their daughter. Every summer for 20 years, he goes to the village during his annual leave from the hospital, which is in a nearby city, and tries to get a divorce from his wife. Every year she says she will permit the divorce but when they get to the court she changes her mind.

There is another woman, a nurse at the hospital, whom he wishes to marry. She waits throughout the 20 years. Morality is very strict under the Communist regime and they have no physical relationship. This situation goes on for a good two thirds of the book, so the reader is waiting as well and yes, that is as uneventful as it sounds. Neither Lin Kong nor his lover are particularly likeable characters and their affair is rather pedestrian.

Finally the divorce is granted, the frustrated lovers marry and then their troubles really begin.
They have a child, the new wife becomes clingy and neurotic and Lin Kong, after all these years, doesn't really have the knack of being a husband. He had moved the ex-wife to the city after the divorce which leads to an ironic ending that is actually quite good but geez, I waited 300 pages for that?

MIRROR MIRROR

Mirror Mirror, by Gregory Maguire, HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2003, 276 pp

Maguire's most recent book, Son of a Witch, just came out, so he was being widely promoted. I somehow had not heard of him but was seduced by the promotion. He also writes children's books and it is all a unique twist on the fantasy genre.

In Mirror Mirror, he takes the tale of Snow White and sets it in Italy, 1502. Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia are pulling their shenanigans and are central to the story. There are dwarves as well. It is an odd mix of history, imagination, legend and something like metaphysics.

It is hard to describe, highly literary, and not an easy read. If it hadn't been for a few books I'd already read, such as Rule of Four, by Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason; Catalina, by Somerset Maugham; and especially Prince of Foxes, by Samuel Shellabarger, all of which deal with that time period, I would have been quite lost. As it was, I could only marvel at his imagination and keep a dictionary close by.

I can't say that I loved the book, but it had a fascination. Though there was plenty of action at times, it seemed to move slowly. Perhaps I was under an enchantment as a reader. I'd like to hear about any of Maguire's books that anyone has read.

THE SONG OF NAMES

The Song of Names, by Norman Lebrecht, Random House, Inc., 2002, 311 pp.

I picked this book out of a shelf of trade paperbacks at one of my favorite independent bookstores: Once Upon A Time, in Montrose, CA. I was solely attracted by the title. On the back cover the blurb says, "Martin Simmonds' father tells him, 'Never trust a musician when he speaks about love.' The advice comes too late." I was sold.

My husband actually read the book first and was completely charmed. (We are both musicians.) He would read to me from it in bed at night. Then it sat on my shelf of to-be-read contemporary fiction for months. Finally I got it selected as a pick for the reading group at the very store where I bought it and sat down to read it last weekend.

I was not disappointed. It has been a while since I enjoyed a book this much. Martin Simmonds is the son of a man who ran a music promotion company that catered to the middle-class as an audience. In 1940s England, that was unique and probably considered quite low-brow. But the man was a master of PR and with this skill would take young hopefuls in classical music and build them a career of minor fame.

Just before Hitler invaded Poland, David Rapoport, a nine year old violin prodigy is left by his father in the care of the Simmonds family. David is many things to the family. To the father, he is the great future star who will make the company well thought of. So David is groomed and coddled, brought to the best teachers, given an almost priceless violin. To nine year old Martin, David is a brother, a companion, an idol, but most of all someone to love in a fairly loveless family. They grow up together and David makes Martin come alive, gives him a personality and Martin feels loved.

The book begins 40 years after David disappeared on the night of his world debut. Martin is an old hypocondriac and a broken spirit. He now runs the family business which has devolved into a shoddy, outdated sheet music company. On a business trip to the English hinterlands, Martin hears a young violinist with a bit of David's signature technique in his playing. So begins the search for the lost David and the reader learns the back story.

It is a wonderful book, written in a smart modern tone but full of history. During the Battle of Britain, you feel you are there with two nine year old boys, doing the paper route and exploring the bomb sites. The world of a training musician, of the singleminded competitive attitude necessary, of the maneuvering by the manager/promoter is all created. And the inner life of a boy growing to manhood in a foreign country with no news of his Jewish family in war-torn Poland is portrayed with reality and sensitivity. But it is not a mawkish or heartwarming story. It is full of human folly and unlovely emotions. The moment when the meaning of the title is revealed was so heart-stopping for me that I had to put the book down for a while. But there is also humor, musical philosophy, religious ideas and a good dose of mystery.

The Song of Names won a Whitbread First Novel Award. Say what you will about awards, but if it hadn't won I may have never heard of or found the book.

THIS AND THAT

Despite all my best intentions, I have not finished my writing on the reading I did for the decade of 1940-1949. I started a new job in September, teaching in a private school. I actually love the job, but it was supposed to be a 5 hours a day, 5 days a week gig but has turned out to be more like 7 hours a day while I learn my way around the school, the kids, the curriculum, etc.

So it is all I can do to keep up my reading. I try to read at least 100 pages a day but a good day is 200 pages. I have started reading books for 1950 and have finished one. Tonight I got about half way through a second. I am also in four reading groups which works out to approximately one book a week, but it is good, because it keeps me reading contemporary books and gives me people to talk to about books. As a wanna-be writer, I think it is healthy to listen to and observe how other readers besides myself react to books. I've been in these reading groups for about a year now and it has been quite revealing.

Although I read the entire LA Times and NY Times book reviews every week as well as Bookmark Magazine every month, although I read about 10 different literary blogs on a regular basis, there is really no comparison to listening to your everyday reader say how she felt about a book. I have met every kind of reader in these groups. There are people who only want to read a book that makes them feel good. There are other people who automatically dislike a book if it does not agree with their views on life, politics, religion, you name it. Some readers in these groups balk if they have to look up words in a dictionary while reading a book. Others freak out if a book is more than 300 pages long. But then there are readers who love learning about some thing, people, or place they didn't know about before. And readers who love history. And readers who just get rapturous over good writing.

Then there is the blog here. I don't know who reads it. Sometimes I get wonderful comments and other times I get emails from people who are too shy or afraid to post a comment. Other times I get those spam comments from people who are promoting their own blogs (and usually selling something). There is some kind of button you can push to keep those people from posting comments, but I am a strong believer in laissez-faire capitalism, so I just let it happen. For most of the time there are no comments at all. But if you are reading this and have ever entertained the idea of posting a comment, PLEASE DO SO. Even if you disagree violently with what I have said about a book, even it you read comic books or Nicholas Sparks, I am interested in what you have to say about reading, books, fiction and how these things affect your life.

This week, I went out and did some retail therapy, after months of being careful not to spend money. My biggest thrill was purchasing Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.
I've read about three chapters and I am the most enthralled with her awareness that any novel is only as good as a reader thinks it is. That is so democratic, so merit based and just so sensible. So getting back to all those book reviews I read, I am afraid I don't have much use for critics who think their job is to criticize any book they read. I read the reviews to find out what has been published. I rarely agree with the reviews. And I write this blog simply to communicate what happened when I read a book, how it affected me and to hopefully stimulate a dialogue on any given book.

What are you reading? What books have you loved? How does reading affect your life?

1941 READING LIST

This is a list of books I read that were published in 1941, as part of My Big Fat Reading Project.

BESTSELLERS

*1. The Keys of the Kingdom, by AJ Cronin. A common man becomes a priest, goes to China in the 1920s, does a lot of good and never really gets recognized for it.
2. Random Harvest, by James Hilton. A World War I amnesia victim finally finds out who he is and finds his lost love.
3. This Above All, by Eric Knight. World War II love story and commentary on war.
4. The Sun Is My Undoing, by Marguerite Steen. Huge, historical novel about a larger than life character, slave trade and abolition in 1840s England.
*5. For Whom The Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway. Holdover from the 1940 list. Spanish Civil War.
6. Oliver Wiswell, by Kenneth Roberts. Another holdover from 1940. Revolutionary War.
7. H M Pulham, Esquire, by John P Marquand. A Boston man, WWI veteran, has money. This is the story of the rest of his life, including having his son go off to WWII.
8. Mr and Mrs Cugat, by Isabel Scott Rorick. Also about well-to-do New England people and the quirks of their marriage.
9. Saratoga Trunk, by Edna Ferber. The lives of a Texas man and a Creole woman who become railroad barons.
*10. Windswept, by Mary Ellen Chase. Wonderful and beautiful story of a man, Maine and values.

OTHERS

1. Between Two Worlds, by Upton Sinclair. Second volume of the World's End series, following Lanny Budd up to the beginning of the Depression.
2. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, by Vladimir Nabokov. Story of a writer.
3. A Curtain of Green, by Eudora Welty. Her first short story collection.
*4. Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler. Great and heavy; Russian communist history as it is rarely told.
5. The Ill Made Knight, by T H White. Third book of the Once and Future King. Lancelot's story.
6. The Castle on the Hill, by Elizabeth Goudge. A plucky heroine survives WW II in England.
7. Wild is the River, Louis Bromfield. Post Civil War story set in New Orleans.
8. Without Signposts, Kathleen Wallace. What it was like for mothers with small children in England during WWII.
*9. The Scum of the Earth, by Arthur Koestler. A memoir about the prison camps to which liberal writers were sent during early WWII.
10. O Henry Prize Stories of 1941.
11. Caldecott Medal: Make Way For Ducklings, by Robert McCloskey. A family of ducklings in Boston.
12. Newbery Award: The Matchlock Gun, by Walter D Edmonds. A ten year old boy defends his mother and sister using an old gun, while his father is off fighting Indians in Colonial America.

* means a book I especially liked.

GUARD OF HONOR

Guard of Honor, James Gould Cozzens, 1949, 631 pp.

With this book, I completed the novels for 1949. It won the Pulitzer Prize that year and took forever to read. I had never heard of it before and that may be because it is highly dated. It concerns only three days on a base of the American Army Air Force in Ocarana, Florida, during World War II. At that time, the Air Force was not yet a separate branch of the military and much of the might of air power was being developed as World War II was fought.

In the three days which the story covers, everything that could go wrong does. In addition, much of the trouble has racism at its root. There is a cast of at least 20 characters and about 10 main characters, so Cozzens uses the circumstances as a frame on which to do character studies of these numerous men and women. The women include WACS and officers' wives. He also throws in a sort of philosophy of war and army life.

So much goes wrong by the second day that I expected a big tragic ending. Instead, it all simmers down and gets approximately sorted out so that you understand that life will go on. Well, I suppose that could be a motto of war and army life.

Generally it was all "good" writing in a combination of English class and newspaper writing training. I found it much too wordy, somewhat pedantic and never fully gripping or exciting. The ending was unforgivable after 550 pages of build-up. I can surely see why we needed a Hemingway to come along.

1940 READING LIST

BESTSELLERS

1. How Green Was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn. Historical, religious, sentimental. Family is very important as it is being pulled apart by the Industrial Revolution in coal mining Wales. M
*2. Kitty Foyle, Christopher Morely. Modern life, beginnings of feminism, class consciousness in Philadelphia of the 20s and 30s. M
3) Mrs Miniver, Jan Struther. War time in England (WWII) with a traditional view on women, very sentimental, made into an Oscar winning movie. M
*4) For Whom The Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway. Spanish Civil War, issues of freedom, democracy, communism.
5. The Nazarene, Sholem Asch. Life of Jesus and the relation of Christian and Jew.
6. Stars on the Sea, F van Wyck Mason. Revolutionary War and the forming of the first American Navy.
7. Oliver Wiswell, Kenneth Roberts. Revolutionary War again but from the Tory view. They don't teach that in school.
*8. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck. The Dust Bowl story; poverty, oppression of the worker, human greed vs human spirit. Pulitzer Prize M
9. Night in Bombay, Louis Bromfield. Leisure class men and women coming of age vs a man who wants to be of use.
10. The Family, Nina Fedorova. War in China, White Russian immigrants, family, honor, religion.

THE OTHER BOOKS
*1. The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene. Religion suppressed by political change in Mexico, questions of faith.
2. The Hamlet, William Faulkner. Good and evil, stupidity and cupidity in small town southern America.
*3. Native Son, Richard Wright. Racial suppression in Chicago, the Black experience.
*4. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers. Loneliness, social disturbance, Reds, discrimination, coming of age and search for love and connection.
*5. The Morning Is Near Us, Susan Glaspell. Family issues and the healing spirit of a woman and love, not sentimental but real.
*6. The Sword and the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness, TH White. The first two books of The Once and Future King, which is the Arthur legend. Dreams of peace and unity, history of the fatal flaw.
*7. World's End, Upton Sinclair. First of a 10 volume series which begins pre WWI. This book introduces Lanny Budd, the hero of the books and follow his young life. War, the truth about war, art and its purpose, coming of age.
8. Farewell My Lovely, Raymond Chandler. Crime in LA, severe societal dysfunction.
*9. The Bird in the Tree, Elizabeth Goudge. (One of my favorite writers.) Family, a strong woman, religion, the ravages of war on personal lives, art.
10. Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Willa Cather. Racial discrimination, the difficulty of women's' lives whether black or white.
11. My Name is Aram, William Saroyan. Immigrant life, rising above poverty and lack of opportunity.
12. Call It Courage, Armstrong Sperry. Polynesian boy has adventures on the sea and overcomes his fears. Newbery Award.
13. They Were Strong and Good, Robert Lawson. A family genealogy of people who built this country. Caldecott Award.

* means I especially liked the book.
M means it was made into a movie.

UPDATE ON MY BIG FAT READING PROJECT

In 2002 I decided to write up the story of my life. I didn't know what I would do with it but at least I could leave it for my children and grandchildren and hopefully put down whatever wisdom I had gleaned. As I started on the project I was struck by how little I knew about the history of my family. In times gone by and in other cultures, the family history is told in stories and children learn it so that they can pass it on to their children. As I was growing up, there were no stories like this. It was as if it all started with our nuclear family. We visited our grandparents and cousins every summer, but no one ever talked about the past. The only thing I could figure is that my parents were only third generation Americans, my grandparents being born to German immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They were more interested in becoming Americans than in preserving the old country tales and traditions. When I was young I cared little about the past. Like most children, I was interested in the present and the future, because as a child one is not aware of having a past, but rather is striving to grow up and see what one's life will become. Now I am past the middle of my life and possibly have more past than future as far as this lifetime goes. Probably my children and grandchildren would find this history I am writing of little interest, but possibly when they reach my age they will have the same kinds of questions I now have.

One day I had the idea that I have probably been influenced all my life by the books and literature of the times I have lived through. I was read to by my parents regularly until I could read myself. I've always read lots and lots of books and in fact, in 1991 I started keeping a log of all the books I read, with a short write-up about each book. I wish I had started doing that earlier, especially during my teen years which I remember as a time of delighted and voracious reading. Anyway, I thought that it would be interesting to find out what were the main popular and important books of fiction throughout my lifetime.

I was searching the web about books and came across a college syllabus for a course in contemporary American literature, which had lists of the top 10 bestsellers for every year since about 1910. Luckily I downloaded the lists beginning with 1940, because that website no longer exists. I was born in 1947, so I began reading the books of 1940. I figured I could find out about the decade into which I was born. I began this reading project in June, 2002. This month I completed reading through the lists all the way up to 1949, so I have completed one decade of reading. For each year, I read the top 10 bestsellers, about 10 other novels by authors I was interested in, the prize winning books of the year (in the 40s there were only the Pulitzer, the Caldecott Medal (for illustrated children's books) and the Newbery Award (for young adult books.) I also read (if I could find them) the Best American and O'Henry Prize Short Story collections.

It has been a fascinating reading journey. I feel as though I was living in rather complete ignorance about the social, political, spiritual and philosophical forces at work in the world as I was growing up. I guess they try to teach you that stuff in school with history and social studies and all, but I found those subjects extremely boring and not much of it sunk in. But the moods and beliefs and stresses of the society around me did sink in. I have always been against war, against racism, against any sort of totalitarian oppression of peoples. One of my earliest memories is from 1950, when I was three years old. On the front page of the New York Times were pictures of people who were obviously suffering. I asked my Dad what it was about and he told me there was a war (the Korean War, of course) and those were pictures of the people who lived where the war was going on. I didn't know what war was, but I was against it from that day on.

This weekend I have been working on gathering the writings I've done since beginning the project. I wrote a summary for each year and now I am attempting to summarize the decade. I will post the decade summary when I get it in some readable form. But some of my reading acquaintances have expressed interest in the lists of books I read. I think the blog is the best place to put this information. Then it is recorded and can be looked up at any time by anyone who is interested.

So coming in the next post is the list for 1940. For each book, I have merely made a short note about the themes in the book. If I especially liked the book, I will put an asterisk. I found all of these books in my local libraries, but I am reading as fast as I can because I am afraid they will be taken off the shelves to make room for newer books. There is quite the controversy going on right now about the Google project to get books digitized. I think it is a great plan. What if all these old novels were lost? Keep the wisdom!

KNIGHT'S GAMBIT

Knight's Gambit, by William Faulkner, Random House, 1949, 246 pp

I read this off and on over several months. It was one of the remaining books on the 1949 list. I did not find it gripping. It is a set of short stories and one novella (Knight's Gambit), all about the lawyer Gavin Stevens, who was a main character in Intruder in the Dust (1948). I loved the earlier book, which had all kinds of wisdom in it. Knight's Gambit features Gavin Stevens' particular wisdom and tolerance for the ways of his local people, as a theme that runs through the stories.

When a crime is involved, as it is in each of these tales, Stevens is the man who can suss out the perpetrator while everyone else is running around perplexed. It is never who it seems and his ability to track down clues is prodigious, but he also has a certain sympathy or empathy for the criminal. At times though, even the reader can't see how he figured it out. But then, Gavin Stevens is a chess player. This reader is not.

CASE HISTORIES

Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson, Little, Brown and Company, 2004, 310 pp

There was quite a stir of reviews when this book came out last year. Her first novel in 1995, Behind The Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Award, so she was an author to keep track of. When I heard it described as literary crime fiction I was intrigued. Then the LitBlog Coop (http://lbc.typepad.com/blog/) picked it for their first Read This! selection in May. So I read it, at least to keep up with the discussion on the blog.

It was not a bad book. It kept me interested and somewhat amused. Jackson Brodie, the PI on the case, is really the weakest character. Yes, he has issues in his personal life and yes, he has all the obligatory dangers of a detective to live through, but he is almost a flat character; a foil against which the other characters reveal themselves.

The "case histories" are three families who each lost someone dear to them but never found the culprit. Now in these families we have some real characters who go through change as people while Jackson solves the crimes. I finished the book about two months ago and it is telling that I do not remember much about who the murderers actually were.

The other problem for me is that keeping three whole different family histories going for more than two decades in one novel of only 300 pages, necessitated many mere glimpses of each story. This was not as bad as in a book like The Jane Austen Book Club, but any one of the family histories would have rivaled Ian McEwan's Atonement had it stood alone. Therefore the whole book is more like a clever device in a novel's drapery.

The summary of these worrisome aspects is that the book was just OK and I will move on to other authors before I read her earlier work.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

No Country For Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy, Alfred A Knopf, 2005, 309pp

This is McCarthy's latest book. I have only read All The Pretty Horses previously but decided to read this one now before finishing the trilogy, because I wanted to and because a respected reading friend read it, on hearing about it from me, and wrote me a long email about it. He found it a bleak and hopeless story.

Some drug runners have a big shoot up somewhere deep in the heart of Texas. A young man riding around in the country comes across the remains of the debacle and finds a case with a couple million dollars in it. The chase is on.

A local sheriff, an old man, gets involved because it happened in his jurisdiction. People die, innocent people are harmed and the sheriff, in confronting a new level of evil and lawlessness, is dismayed. Interspersed with the story are the sheriff's musings, which is where McCarthy gets to put in his philosophy.

So the outcome is tragic and it is pretty bleak, but I did not find it hopeless. It is definitely about evil getting the upper hand and is a message to people to be aware of that. I think that evil erupts at various times and places in the world. It is happening now and it takes a high confront of evil to fight back and overcome it. Not necessarily by starting wars with other countries, but by getting in ethics in your own country. The age of innocence which America has enjoyed for so long has ended. At the end of T H White's The Once and Future King, Arthur is old and broken, his kingdom and his dream for England are in tatters. But he grabs a young knight and tells him the dream and what needs to be done. He passes the torch to the young. I think that is the message of McCarthy's book. This is no country for old men.

THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN

The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester, HarperCollins Publishers, 1998, 242pp.

This is the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, with emphasis on two men in particular. Dr James Murray was the editor of the dictionary, who labored for decades at the Scriptorium (the dictionary's headquarters ) at Oxford. The idea was first proposed on November 5, 1857, but it was not until 1878 that James Murray, a public school teacher and longtime member of the Philological Society was accepted at Oxford as its editor. He organized the methods of collecting the definitions and had a whole army of volunteers to help him complete the project.

Dr W C Minor was an American medical doctor and Army captain, who suffered from mental illness and finally landed in the equivalent of a mental ward in an English prison for committing murder when overcome by his madness. While thus imprisoned, he contributed massive amounts of data to the dictionary for over 20 years. In the book, Winchester covers the unusual relationship between these two men; each is a type of genius and each is mad in his own way.

I learned that I am a philologist: one who loves learning and literature and who studies literature, grammar, literary criticism and the relation of literature to history. After 25 years of intense dictionary usage to understand what I study, I saw the other side of the coin, which was people studying books to find the definitions and historical development of our language. Now that I have read this account of how the dictionary was prepared and why it is laid out as it is, the entries make much more sense to me. Each definition in the OED is followed by a quotation which is an example of the earliest use of that meaning of the word that was found in books or literature. The OED is the most complete account of the history of the English language in existence.

The Professor and the Madman is fascinating. I felt that the author spent a bit too much time speculating on the causes and nature of Dr Minor's mental aberrations, but other than that it was an eye-opening account of a monumental labor that I had previously taken for granted.