This cloudy brain really manifested in my reading. I thought I'd get all this reading done, especially since my husband was gone, and I could leave the light on and read in bed. But I couldn't focus on the pages. I'd pick up one book and then another and read a few pages and forget what I just read or set the book down one evening and forget what was happening in the book the next. I thought I would organize notes for school, too, since I'm not teaching. That still hasn't happened, but I did break through the reading block.
The book that did it for me was Jessmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing. Maybe the reading block was because what I was reading was dense and meditative, rather than plot driven (I still haven't finished Pico Iyer's The Lady and the Monk, about his year in Kyoto, or Beldan Lane's Backpacking with the Saints. I really like the writers' styles and their topics, but they, too, write in an unconnected way. Lane quotes almost too many saints and describes so many trails, I can't keep the epiphanies he has straight. And while Iyer's book is more narrative, it moves slowly, serpentinely, almost like the streets of Kyoto he describes. (I really wanted to go to Kyoto when we visited Japan several years ago, but we didn't have enough time, and the cost of the bullet train was prohibitive for our group. Since we never summitted Mount Fuji, we are still due to return to Japan.)
Then last week I picked up Ward's book in a Little Free Book Box. (I bless and curse those things. I can't pass them without looking in. Even though they are probably full of germs, they are also full of surprises.) I haven't read anything by Ward, a National Book Award writer, nor was she really on my list of to-reads, but I picked this book up one night and never set it back down. Good thing I started around 10 and it was only about 1:30 when I finished. Not as late as some nights. It's the story of a family in Mississippi that is struggling against drugs, racism, poverty, and ghosts. The last part immediately recalled Toni Morrison's Beloved. The ghosts show up after the characters are very solidly real in your mind, although they are sketched in lightly, a testament to Ward's gifts. The family retains their dignity and their capacity for love and to be loved despite some dark moments. Ward makes empathizing with meth addicts possible. The narrative evolves around some dark moments, most told in flashbacks or as stories within the story, but the bonds of the family, particularly the love of the grandfather and grandson, hold them together. This is one I want to sit with a while and come back to.
I also just finished T. C. Boyle's collection of short stories, Wild Child. The title story is the last in the collection, and it is different in style and content from most of the other stories, which are about contemporary characters who fail to make connections with others, who have stifled desires and dreams, who look for love and meaning in their small lives, usually without finding it, although some of them do. The story of a courier who rescues a woman's child stuck in a mudslide was notable for that brief heroism. The title story is about a feral child in France from the turn of the nineteenth century. After being caught by villagers, he is turned over to an orphanage for deaf-mute children and comes under the care of a young doctor who sees his humanity and spends years trying to teach him to speak and communicate and wear clothes. The ending isn't entirely happy. But despite the comparative darkness of Boyle's stories, I do enjoy his writing. His settings are usually around Santa Barbara where he lives, so they are familiar. And his characters skirt around hard questions of faith and purpose and meaning. They usually fall short of finding answers, but they are haunted by the desire for something more to life.
I slowly finished a few other things over the last six weeks. I'm in a Read Harder challenge book club, so I've been reading some atypical books for me to complete that challenge. One of the categories is to read a literary magazine - and the little Free Book box had an issue of The Sewanee Review, Summer 2019. Picked it up in a little free book box, of course. The Review is the oldest lit journal in the country, I'm pretty sure, and has been the first place of publication for many famous writers, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and reviews. Favorites from this issue: Poetry: Garrett Hongo's "A Garland of Light" which is about a walk around Rome in honor of Robert Hayden. Also a war poem, "Collateral Rabbits" by Graham Barnhart. Fiction: "Family Oracle," by Celia Bell about a women who talks to the dead, and Michael Hawley's "Somerville," about a creepy woman who takes on her dead roommate's persona after she burned their apartment down.
I also finished Alice Walker's newest poetry collection, Taking the Arrow of the Heart, and since I heard her read from it in February, I included it in the category of Spoken Word poetry, in case I don't get around to listening to a whole book.
A short read I finished: A collection of essays by Rebecca Solnit called Men Explain Things to Me, which came out in 2014 and most of the essays were previously published essays in response to earlier issues that became the Me Too movement. I'm a fan of Solnit's other books: Wanderlust and A Field Guide to Getting Lost are the two I've read. The title essay begins with an anecdote about a party she attended with a friend where the host, a wealthy businessman, discovers she's a writer, asks what she has written about (Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneer of movement photography, which paved the way for movies), and then tells her all he knows about Muybridge, because he read a review about an important book about this man -- which is Solnit's book, of course! It's a funny anecdote about a all-too-common occurrence, but Solnit writes fairly, in my opinion, and doesn't indict all men, while still critiquing a culture that has a long way to go towards equality. On that same theme, I'm also finished Ta- Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me - it was eyeopening.
I also finished George Saunders's Tenth of December, which I started probably a year ago. I really liked this collection of essays better this time around - they are a bit dark and perhaps suit the season better than when I started them and couldn't get into it. Saunders's characters. like Boyle's, are misfits and losers and bad things happen to them, but there are a few bright spots of hope - a skinny kid who gets beaten to death protecting the popular girl next door from getting raped, a participant in a clinical study of mind-morphing drugs who smashes his head in rather than watch another participant get killed because he condemns her, a boy with mental disabilities accidentally comes across a man who is trying to kill himself, and then he falls in a freezing lake and the suicidal man has to save him - they both walk half-naked through a wintry woods to return to the road. Saunders's writing is spare but creates unforgettable visual images. The endings were more hopeful overall than Boyle's. Loved it, but not one I'd recommend to everyone.
Anne Bogel's Don't Overthink It is self-help book I finished, a genre that is often fine, rarely great. This is also a fine book, which I kind of expected. I usually don't buy these kinds of books, but I like the author's blog - and I am definitely an overthinker, so I bought it from her local bookstore in a moment of NOT overthinking. I thought it had some good advice, but some of her personal anecdotes were familiar from the blog.
More fun were a couple picture book stand outs: Under My Hijab by Hena Khan (who notes in the afterward that she does not choose to wear a hijab, although she is an observant Muslim) is a fun way to introduce the younger set of non-Muslims to the tradition of wearing a hijab. It's told in rhyme with brightly colored, simple illustrations from the viewpoint of a young girl who notices how each of the women among her family and friends wear their hijab differently in a way that expresses their personalities. One page shows them as professional women (a doctor, an art teacher, a scout leader, a baker, a teenager) in public and the next page shows them at home with their hair down and uncovered.
Then Jim Ottaviani and Maris Wicks' Primates was another good read: a graphic novel about Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas (who studied orangutans) and how all these women were linked through Louis Leakey. I learned a lot about these women and primates from this book - started a rabbit hole of research for us. Highly recommend!
For my Catholic women's book club I finished The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri Nouwen. We held a Zoom meeting for this book that went pretty well - fun to see everyone's faces although the lag time between comments slowed the conversation a bit. My favorite part of the book was the last section on the Father. Nouwen comes to realize he must see himself not as the younger son, or the elder brother, but like the Father in the parable of the Prodigal Son (and in the painting by Rembrandt that inspires the reflections on the parable and the painting.) At the time, Nouwen was moving from his work in academia to his role in L'Arche, a major shift in the practice of his vocation. Reflecting on how we are called to love like the father, forgiving, merciful, welcoming, helped him move away from the desire to be loved to the ability to give love.
For my rosary group's Lenten reflection we read Fr. Looney's A Lenten Journey with Mother Mary, which got a lot of good reviews. I found it fine - a nice mix of hard and easy daily "goals." Not especially profound, but our group was inspired to do more research on some of the lesser known visions of Mary that he mentions, and that was educational.
For my rosary group's Lenten reflection we read Fr. Looney's A Lenten Journey with Mother Mary, which got a lot of good reviews. I found it fine - a nice mix of hard and easy daily "goals." Not especially profound, but our group was inspired to do more research on some of the lesser known visions of Mary that he mentions, and that was educational.
So now that I've come to the end of this summary, I realize I have finished a few things in the last six weeks or so. Next project: Organizing photos and trying to decide whether to replace or repair the desktop that just died. I don't really like working on a laptop, and now we are playing musical chairs with devices. I took the desktop in to the local repair guy, and he can retrieve data and install a new driver but my husband thinks we have everything stored in the googleplex and that the computer is outdated, so that it should be consigned to the electronic graveyard. (I think we bought it in 2014) and not worth repairing. Sigh. I hate ewaste and planned obsolescence.)
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