Reading Matters, Post Script

As the title of the post states, this is but a short P.S. to my earlier post, Reading Matters. In that post I stated definitively that I had declined to read The Art Of Racing In The Rain, this month's book for my book club. My refusal was on the grounds that I knew it was going to be sad, and leave me crying in the rain.  Or, really, since I'm in New Mexico, in the brilliant sunshine. However, in a comment to that post, Kathy stated just as definitively "I loved The Art of Racing in the Rain. Crying or not, I loved it." The woman who suggested it for the club had also loved it.

So, on Tuesday afternoon I settled into the old wicker rocker on the back porch and devoted myself to reading Enzo's story.  Enzo is a dog.  And so, just as I thought, the book is as sad as any book narrated by a dog is bound to be.  It was also, to my huge surprise, an extremely spiritual and uplifting story. The track, and racing on it, serves as a terrific metaphor for life and how to live it - and Enzo has a better, clearer, and more compassionate outlook on life than most who are already living it as humans. I managed to read the entire book that afternoon before our club meeting and participate in the discussion. But I delayed the last few pages until I was safely in the shelter of my own home, and with my own sweetie to comfort me.  All dog books end with the dog's death, and this one is no exception.  But it might be one of the most beautiful, hopeful, wonderful literary deaths I've ever read.  I can only hope my own could come any where close to Enzo's. 

If you're looking for something utterly engaging and delightful to fill some empty hours, on a plane, a beach, a train, you couldn't do better than to pass those hours with Enzo and Dennie, their family and friends.  Just be sure to have a large clean handkerchief close by as you approach the end of the story.  Also it might be good if it was your own copy.  I found myself longing to underline or highlight often.  But the library frowns on their patrons taking such action.

Reading Matters

I had a "page" on my personal blog that I called "Reading," but I consistently forgot to write there about what I was reading; and a few days ago while attempting to catch up on it I somehow managed to completely delete it.  Nobody looks at those Pages anyhow, so, I think I will just write in the blog itself when I feel like discussing what I am reading. Or, not reading. I'm currently having a very hard time settling into anything that really grabs me.  Wonder if others have those strange blank spells? Nothing you pick up, no matter how great the reviews, or enticing the cover, grabs you and makes you want to turn the pages.  It's kind of a Reader's Block, instead of Writer's Block. The book for our neighborhood book club, meeting tomorrow evening, is The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein, which I declined to read.  It is narrated by a charming and personable dog, and after my partner, Gail (who very seldom cries), finished the book in heaving sobs, I knew I was going to skip it.  Since childhood (remember Old Yeller?) I have avoided dog books - their sole purpose is to break the reader's heart.  Our own crazy little old dog's death is still too recent for me to risk waking up that pain. 

We recently found Sea of Troubles, in a new paperback reprint and I gobbled it up in a couple of nights It's one of Donna Leon's Venice mysteries that has been, mysteriously, unavailable for far too long, and I devoured it in a couple of nights.  There are two others that seem to be missing, and I'm hoping they're next in line to return.  If you love a good police procedural, captivating protagonists, great food, and exiting locations, Leon's series of books with Commissario Guido Brunetti will be right up your alley.  I have never been to Venice, but from these books I feel I know it, in its contemporary form at least.  It's clear from these novels that Italy has its share of the woes and tribulations of modern life, but the beauty of this ancient city also manages to shine through.  Many of the mysteries have to do with environmental problems, and political corruption, as well as immigration problems.  All things we are familiar with and think of as our own national difficulties.  But, after I finished with Sea of Troubles, I was right back into my lack of enthusiasm for anything I pick up to read.  I have things on hold with the library system, but lack of funding has forced them to seriously cut back on the number of copies they order, and it can take weeks and weeks to get a popular book.


So, while I wait for my holds on the latest titles by Jane Smiley, Anna Quindlen, Scott Turow, James Lee Burke, Sharon McCrumb, and others, I am desultorily picking at one unread volume or another off our shelves.  We are trying not to buy books right now, so it's the long hard wait, unless I lose control completely and find myself at the register at Bookworks with a stack of new books in my arms.   Anyone have any suggestions?
(Cross-posted from Quid Nunc?)

Book Club Report, First Book Discussion

Since I began my book club adventure with an appeal to readers of this blog to tell me of their book club experiences, I thought it would be only fair to report in, now that I seem to be launched into this. As I previously reported, the book chosen for our first read was The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, something I would never in a month of Sundays have picked up to read of my own choice.  However, almost against my will, I madly loved it.  It's not great literature, but it's a damn good read, a book that crawled right up into my heart, made me laugh out loud as well as tear up a time or two, and feel sad and reluctant when I had to turn the last page. The characters in this epistolary novel were so beautifully delineated through their letters and notes that they were alive and breathing, real and very quirky human beings. 

So, last night the neighborhood women in this book club gathered in Carla's cozy living room to discuss The Guernsey Literary Society, with Paula leading the discussion.  I already knew from our emails that several of the other women loved the book as much as I did (and I knew that Gail did because we read in the same house and have our own discussions right here) but in fact every one of us felt the same way.  The discussion was lively, intelligent, heartfelt, with only a few digressions (and I for one often find digressions quite interesting).  For me one of the best parts of the evening was discovering how interesting and simpática these neighborhood women are.  I knew one of them fairly well, from political co-conspiring during the 2008 elections, but the rest have up till now been people I wave and smile at when we cross paths walking dogs, having yard sales, riding bikes, and so forth. After just two meetings with the purpose of reading together, I feel that we can actually become more than acquaintances, may ultimately become friends.

The most difficult part of last night was figuring out the choice of a new book for next month. It's next to impossible to find a book no one has yet read, and one that we're all interested in reading.  Finally we settled on The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, which Gail and I have actually read.  It was Nancy's strong choice, and she was willing to lead the discussion; so it was late, we were tired, and all said yes to it.  I will have to browse this book again to refresh my memory.  It's quite a compelling novel, especially for someone who lived through pre-Civil Rights days in the South:  Texas, North Carolina and Washington D.C. in my case. It's garnered some controversy, but is still one of the most popular reads in the country after several months as a bestseller. Our own Women On writer Cynthia of the blog Sorting The Pieces read and reviewed it earlier this year, her post will give readers a good idea of the power of this book.

Remarkable Creatures

Neither prehistoric creatures nor strong-minded independent women are unusual or surprising to us in our current time period. But the remarkable creatures of the title of Tracy Chevalier's latest novel are just those two life forms: prehistoric marine animals and the fossil hunting women who first discover them. Remarkable Creatures is Chevalier's sixth published novel, although only the second one I have read. I loved Girl With a Pearl Earring, and can't imagine why I stopped reading her after that.This book gripped me from the first page, and didn't let go until I finished it several nights ago. Even Apolo Ohno and Lindsey Vonn couldn't tear me away from the spell of this story. For maybe the first time in my winter-Olympics-loving life, I watched the athletes with one eye from time to time, but my real attention was on Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot as they dug and toiled on the beach at Lyme Regis, then toiled even more fiercely to have their discoveries acknowledged by the "learned gentlemen" of their time. Their time being partly the Georgian Period and partly the Victorian, hardly good years for outspoken intelligent women. Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859, twelve years after Mary Anning died, but as Ruth Padel says in her enthusiastic review of the book in The Guardian:

New life is formed from extinction and death," wrote Darwin in 1838, in a private notebook. Some 20 years later, he based The Origin of Species on the fact that fossils document a continuum of life forms, demonstrating that millions of species died out as others took their place. A generation earlier, however, when Tracy Chevalier's rough-petticoated heroine was pulling out of cliffs in Lyme Regis the evidence that would go into this insight, nobody wanted to believe that God did not, as one of Chevalier's characters puts it, "plan out what He would do with all of the animals He created.

On the book's website the story is summarized quite briefly thus:

In 1810, a sister and brother uncover the fossilized skull of an unknown animal in the cliffs on the south coast of England. With its long snout and prominent teeth, it might be a crocodile – except that it has a huge, bulbous eye.

Remarkable Creatures is the story of Mary Anning, who has a talent for finding fossils, and whose discovery of ancient marine reptiles such as that ichthyosaur shakes the scientific community and leads to new ways of thinking about the creation of the world.

Working in an arena dominated by middle-class men, however, Mary finds herself out of step with her working-class background. In danger of being an outcast in her community, she takes solace in an unlikely friendship with Elizabeth Philpot, a prickly London spinster with her own passion for fossils.

The strong bond between Mary and Elizabeth sees them through struggles with poverty, rivalry and ostracism, as well as the physical dangers of their chosen obsession. It reminds us that friendship can outlast storms and landslides, anger and and jealousy.

So, yes, that's sort of a fossil version of the story, but if that was all I had to go on to entice me into reading it, I might not have done so. This summary doesn't give the reader any idea of the richness, the historical texture of the novel.  So many strands of what was happening in science, in religion, even in literature (Jane Austen is briefly an offstage character), are woven into the tapestry of this story, yet it remains vibrant and alive, never stuffy nor boring - as historical novels can often deteriorate into being. Chevalier's forté is taking historical events and characters, then using her own magic as a writer to put them into novels.The bones of her stories are factual, but the magic lies in the way the author can imagine the characters' interior life, motivations, emotions, interactions. Spend some time exploringt the book's website, a rich resource, read Padel's review linked to above, and see if this doesn't sound like maybe your next read.  I promise it will be an engrossing one. And I intend to put Chevalier's unread novels into my library queue at once.(Cross-posted from Quid Nunc?)

To Book Club or Not To Book Club?? That Is The Question.

I'm looking for some experiential commentary here, maybe even some advice.  At our neighborhood Thanksgiving gathering (This is a very chummy neighborhood. We had a gigantic Thanksgiving potluck at the Millers' the Sunday before the actual holiday, with a turkey deepfrying on the patio, one roasting in the oven, aall of us bringing various dishes, wine, and so forth, while footballs games blared on TVs in both living and dining rooms.) some of the women in the 'hood began discussing getting a book club started amongst us.  Our oldest and dearest neighbor died soon after the New Year, and at her memorial gathering the topic came back up again.  This morning I had an email from one of the main suggesters of this book club idea, with everyone's email addresses and a request to send our favored days/hours to have an organizational gathering and get this show on the road. So, Looks like it's really happening.

Okay, so here's the deal - Neither Gail nor I have ever belonged to a book club of any sort.  We are constant readers, always have at least one book going at any given time, and a long queue waiting in various piles around the house and at the Public Library, but we've never done any organized group discussing of what we read since we were in college literature classes a thousand years ago.  We feel a little resistance to reading something a book group chooses, rather than what we ourselves choose to read.  On the other hand,
 we like our neighbors, know this would be a good way to get to know some of them on a less-superficial level, and maybe read outside our comfort zone.  Or not.  So, here's my question to the women in this group blog and any readers who visit  - have you ever belonged, or do you now belong to any sort of book club?  What has your experience with this been?  We can't be the only sixty-something year old women in America who've never belonged to a reading club, can we?  Help us out here, I'm really asking for some indepth thoughts on this subject.  (Photo: Our hall bookshelves.)

What's In Your Piles?

This is something I used to do back in the AOL JournalLand days, when I had a good coterie of readers and, dare I say, virtual friends. I think I did this on The Bibliophiles, my book journal. It's a fun activity to do once in a while, see what interesting things we have in our various piles, how they change over time (or not). I just finished A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, and have some thoughts on it in my other blog, here. It's kind of a relief to turn to Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford as a less taxing read, the first book in my first pile. As it's winter and about my only outdoor activities are walking and hiking, my main offtime activity is reading - so there's quite a few piles around the house:

On the nightstand:

The Monster In The Box, Ruth Rendell
Alimentum; The Literature of Food, Issue 9
Owls and Other Fantasies, Mary Oliver
What We Eat When We Eat Alone, Deborah Madison/Patrick McFarlin
Wherever You Go, There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn
Deep Economy, Bill McKibben

By the couch:

Xeriscape Plant Guide, Denver Water
New Mexico Gardener's Guide, Judith Phillips
Native Texas Plants, Sally Wasowski
New Mexico Bird Finding Guide, NM Ornithological Society
Desert Wetlands, Niemeyer & Fleischner
Poems FromThe Cranes Two, Judith Roderick
The Quilts of Gee's Bend

And, worst - or best - of all, the pile of new books I've bought, or from the library, waiting to be read. I call this my "Reason to Keep Living" pile:

Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro
In The Kitchen, Monica Ali
Hardball, Sarah Paretsky
A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore
The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver
The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood I started reading this one, before she came for an appearance at UNM, then set it aside when a flood of library books from my hold list showed up all at once. I will return to it when I get a library dry spell.