New Century Reading

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

I read this book many, many times during adolescence, and absolutely loved it. It was introduced to me by my mother, who also read it as a teen and loved it. How's that for a feel-good anecdote? So when my book club decided to read this for January, I was feeling some warm fuzzies at the thought of returning to such a well-loved book.

Well. I loved it all over again. But only after I got through some terrible shocks, such as the blatant anti-Semitism and stereotyping of various ethnic groups, bigamy, pedophilia, acute alcoholism--gosh, I remembered none of that. My romantic older self remembered a charming narrator by the name of Francie Nolan who endured a poverty-stricken childhood in Brooklyn during the early part of the 1900s, but everything I remembered had a distinct charm-filled filter.

Not that there aren't charming things in this book. There are; but there are plenty of not-charming things too, as I've mentioned above. I had to really spend some time thinking about not finishing the book, and if I was going to continue, how I felt about all the other stuff.

Here's what I came to: This book is still worth reading, if only for the picture of a very specific time and place. If I was going to share this with a young person, I would do so on the condition that we have a lot of conversations about the attitudes displayed. I'm not a fan of the idea that we ignore these things, or pretend they didn't (or don't still) happen. Better to talk about them. Unfortunately, I ended up missing book club, so no doubt I missed a good discussion.

Overall, the story of Francie and her family--brother Neeley, overworked mother and alcoholic father--is one of tough spirit and rising above, which is no doubt why it's a classic that's still being read now. As I read, I wondered how much of this is autobiographical; what little I know of author Betty Smith's biography seems to indicate that she drew heavily from real life. In my edition's afterword, Smith's daughter says of her mother, "She often said about 'Tree' that she didn't write it the way it was, but the way it should have been."

That makes my mother's heart hurt. This is a very harsh novel in places. And that's an improvement over how it really was? Yikes.

I'm glad I returned to it, even if it jolted me very uncomfortably in many ways.

Improvement

Boy, did I love this book. This is a collection of stand-alone stories, but they all circle around the characters and their connections, sometimes tenuous, to one another. In the opening story, single mother Reyna dutifully visits her boyfriend, Boyd, in prison on a minor offense. When he gets out, he's immediately enticed back into a life of minor crime. Reyna adores him, but she's uncomfortably aware that if the minor crime goes bad, it could easily affect her and her young son, so she refuses to be a part of it. It's a decision that has significant ramifications on many people around her.

From there, the story spreads out to include Reyna's eccentric aunt, Kiki, who by all accounts has lived an interesting, unusual life, a life that also has long-reaching effects. 

The book wanders from New York to Berlin to Turkey, but its threads are as intricately woven as the threads on the (beautiful) rug on the cover. (And yes, elaborate rugs play a role in the book beyond being a metaphor.) Joan Silber is such an amazing writer; in lesser hands, this would have been a mess of strained connections and eye-rolling coincidences, but her light, sure touch makes all of them feel real and unforced. Even better, I never found a set of characters I wasn't interested in spending time with. Some are more likable and sympathetic than others, but all were interesting and so very human.

I feel like Silber is sort of an underrated author, but I've loved everything I've read that she's written, and can hardly wait for the next one.

The Changeling

This book. How do I describe it while avoiding spoilers? Pretty darn tough, I'll tell you that. It starts fairly innocuously with Apollo, whose father abandoned Apollo and his mother when Apollo was young, meeting Emma, wooing her, marrying, and having a son. This is probably the first third of the book, and it's entertaining, charming without being twee, and then--boom. It gets dark. Very dark, very quickly. And suddenly we're in a world where Apollo's name means something, and fairy tales are real, and there are mentions of Norse myths and supernatural events and even, by God, a mention of Catherine Linton that I still don't quite understand but am fascinated by (and I can't for a second believe it's a coincidence that author LaValle uses that name). 

But to give a clearer outline of the plot, I'd have to give spoilers, and I'm just not going to do that. I'll just say: If you like magical realism, if you like myth and fairy tales (the real Grimm tales, not the Disneyfied versions), and if you like great writing, this one's for you. Oh: and it's a love letter to reading: "Unsupervised reading is a blessing for a certain kind of child."

Having finished the book, now I really want to return to those dark fairy tales: "Merchants were making money, and they wanted to live better than the lower classes did. This meant there were new rules about how to behave, both for the adults and for the kids. Fairy tales changed accordingly. Now they had to have a moral, something to train those children in the new rules. Which is when they started turning to shit. A bad fairy tale has some simple goddamn moral. A great fairy tale tells the truth."

When the English Fall

What we have here is the diary of Jacob, an Amish farmer whose family and community witness some bizarre lights in the sky one night, and then slowly, their world falls apart. Turns out there's been a devastating celestial storm, and now America--and the world--is brought to a halt. 

Well, the world outside the Amish community, of course. Non-Amish are referred to as the "English" by the Amish. The Amish, not reliant on electricity, computers, and the internet, continue their simple lives, working on harvest, preserving food for the winter. But they're increasingly aware of what's happening in the outside world, and eventually, like it or not, the outside world lands on their doorstep.

I admit, I found this book a disappointment. I don't think the diary format worked well. It puts the reader at such a distance. And, bluntly, it's awfully slow until the very end. Which is how it would be--the Amish would be sheltered and just trying to continue their work. But it makes for slow reading. Plus, there's some back story with Jacob's family that isn't fully fleshed out, and the other members of his community aren't fleshed out either. I might have quit reading if I hadn't seen reviews that promised me the ending would redeem the book.

Nope.

Also? Jacob's daughter has seizures and visions. Boy, is that a strained part of the narrative.

Bottom line, if you're interested in reading about the Amish in apocalyptic situations, you're better off checking out The Hallowed Ones. Much better read.

Don't Call Us Dead

I was trying to think of a non-cliched way to describe this book of poetry: Harrowing. Fierce. Searing. OK, great, I'm not succeeding in my originality quest.

Don't Call Us Dead is the second collection from Danez Smith, and it's a grab-you-by-your-throat-and-don't-let-go book. Danez writes poems from a compound voice: a black man, gay, HIV-positive. The book opens in an afterlife populated by black men who have been shot and killed by police. Smith goes on to look, unflinchingly, at all the kinds of forces that affect black men in general and he himself in particular. Touching on gun violence, racism, living with HIV, and suicide, there's anger and despair, but there's also glimmers of hope, but no glimmer comes without its history present:

"O, precious God! O, sweet black town!
i am drunk & i thirst. when i get to the boy

who lets me practice hunger with him
i won't give him the name of your newest ghost

i will give him my body & what he does wtih it
is none of my business, but i will say look

i made it a whole day, still, no rain
still, i am without exit wound

& he will say tonight, i want to take you
how the police do, unarmed & sudden.

Go, Went, Gone

Talk about a timely book. The protagonist of Go, Went, Gone (the edition I read had commas in the title, unlike the one I found on Goodreads to grab a picture) is a retired professor in Berlin. He's a childless widower, and he's a bit at odds over what to do in his retirement. When he learns that there are African refugees undergoing a hunger strike, he becomes curious and goes to visit them. Soon, under the guise of a research project, he manages to find his way into their small community and begins interviewing them to learn what brought them to Berlin, what they'd left behind, and what they hoped for.

Of course he's got a fairly naive outlook--wouldn't many of us? As he learns their stories, he's both horrified and intrigued. He's also increasingly aware of the xenophobia in his German community, something that, given German history, makes him more than a little uncomfortable. He also finds more common ground than he expected. In his younger days, he and his wife ended up on the east side of the Berlin Wall, so he understands the feelings of confinement and longing for escape, as well as the strangeness and disillusionment that can happen when escape finally occurs.

This is not a book in which a great deal happens. It's a very "talky" book, but when something does happen, it ratchets the tension up mightily. And sometimes that's something as small as Richard (the professor) realizing there are bigots and xenophobes among his long-time social circle, or as big as near-riots at a refugee facility. 

It's an important, thought-provoking topic. If I had any wishes for this book, it's that I wish some of it hadn't felt more like newspaper coverage than fiction. And, without spoilers, something is revealed at the very end that left me entirely, "What now???" After mulling it over for several hours, I'm still not clear on why the reveal was positioned there, or what it's supposed to do for the book as a whole.

But kudos to author Erpenbeck, who clearly did her homework, and clearly isn't afraid to call people out on their uninformed opinions. Just look at this line:

"Must living in peace--so fervently wished for throughout human history and yet enjoyed in only a few parts of the world--inevitably result in refusing to share it with those seeking refuge, defending it instead so aggressively that it almost looks like war?"

Heat & Light

This is the first book I finished in 2018, and boy howdy does it set a high standard for my reading going forward this year. Set in a fictional Pennsylvania town called Bakerton, formerly a coal stronghold, but now struggling, Heat & Light looks at what happens when a rich streak of natural gas is discovered under the town. The gas companies come calling, offering profitable leases to people's land, for just the small discomfort of allowing the companies to start fracking. Some Bakerton residents sign up right away, desperate for some easy money. Others have doubts.

Eventually enough people sign up for the fracking to begin. No one in Bakerton is prepared for the disruption--the noise, the traffic, and all the prime jobs going to experienced out-of-towners rather than unemployed Bakertonians. The local bars can hardly keep up. 

Worse, some of the people whose land is being drilled begin to notice things, unpleasant things; weird odors, a peculiar taste to well water. 

While that's the foundation of the book--ripped right from the headlines--the true story is of the people of Bakerton and how they react. Whether it's prison guard Rich Devlin, who would love to get the extra income to turn his father's property into a proper working farm, or his wife Shelby, who is a bit of a hypochondriac and worries that the drilling will cause health problems for her children, especially her frail young daughter; or Mack and Rena, a same-sex couple who have an organic farm and fear they will lose that status, which is essentially what keeps them in business; to Pastor Jess, a widow whose husband died young, convinced his cancer was a result of his exposure to the catastrophe at Three Mile Island in the 1970s; all these people have a history, both in Bakerton and with each other, often in very complicated ways.

One of the things I loved about this book is that there's a huge cast of characters, but author Haigh fleshes them out so well that I had no trouble keeping them straight. What's more, I never had a ping of disappointment when changing points of view. So often with a large cast, I find myself thinking, Oh, no, not this character again. But that never happened here. I was invested in all of them, as flawed as they all were, and interested in their actions and outcomes.

I also loved Haigh's writing. Early on, she writes: "More than most places, Pennsylvania is what lies beneath." Wow, there's a lot to take in with that one sentence.

Or this, when Rich's brother Darren thinks about the town's early mining history and how it had a somewhat storied past: "By the time Darren came along, the land had been clumsily backfilled, covered over with grass; but the old strippins was still talked about, tales that took on mythic dimensions. It is the essence of a Bakerton childhood: the foregone conclusion that every worthwhile thing has already happened. The town is all aftermath."

To my delight, I discovered that this is Haigh's third Bakerton book, although all of them apparently stand alone. I've already requested the other two.

Saga Volumes 1 and 2

Saga Vol. 1 opens with a woman giving birth, and it's quickly established that she and her husband are a space-age Romeo and Juliet, each descended from a long line of the other's enemies. But unlike the classical teens, Alana and Marko are fiercely committed to staying alive and protecting their newborn daughter against the longest of odds. It takes very little time before forces who oppose them (and there are many) begin to search for them, and there are numerous close calls involving freelance assassins, who themselves have been put into competition with each other--and with whom there are some intriguing past stories as well.

Continuing into Vol. 2, the battle for survival continues with a teenage girl ghost who lost the lower half of her body and has ghostly entrails hanging out and Marko's parents. 

That is just the most basic outline of these two books, the first of many, but let me tell you this: I was sucked into the story, wham bang, with the first page of volume 1, tore through volume 2, and am impatiently checking my library queue several times a day to see if volumes 3 and 4 have arrived for me yet. Author Brian K. Vaughan not only tells a fast-paced, engrossing story, he also manages to develop characters as the action continues nonstop. We get to know Alana and Marko very well, with all their flaws, and we grow increasingly committed to standing by them. But it's not just the leads who are fleshed out--we learn about the royalty overseeing the lengthening wars, the freelance assassins, the ghosts--they all have stories and three-dimensional personalities.

But what also helps is the artwork by Fiona Staples. She's wildly creative and has a fantastic sense of how to flesh out these otherworldly creatures. Her illustrations are vivid, eye-catching, and an absolutely integral part of the story.

Note that these are very much adult comic books--the F bomb drops multiple times, there's a ton of blood (yes, it's illustrated blood, but still), and graphic (no pun intended) sex scenes. But for the grownups who like a ripping good yarn, like sci fi and fantasy, and like well-drawn characters (again, no pun intended), this is a must.

The End-of-Year Post

It's time. What did I read in 2017?

Stats:

Books read: 101 (a record, I believe! Although given that I read a lot during a six-week period when I had two family members having a contest to see who could spend the most time in the hospital, I'm not sure this is worth getting excited about)
Novels: 56
Short story collections: 4
Nonfiction: 27 (might also be a record)
Poetry: 6
Young adult: 2
Classics: 11
Graphic novels: 11
Male authors: 34
Female authors: 60
Re-reads: 9

Favorite reads, in no particular order (links are to my reviews):
Voices from Chernobyl
A Gentleman in Moscow
Lincoln in the Bardo
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
March, volumes 1, 2, and 3
What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky
My Name is Lucy Barton
Fever Dream
Displacement
The Hate U GIve
The Summer Book
Goodbye, Vitamin
The Refugees
You Don't Have to Say You Love Me
Pride and Prejudice
Rebecca
The Best We Could Do
Stay With Me
Four Souls
Whereas
Autopsy
Reservoir 13
Persuasion
Christmas Days (by Jeanette Winterson--review coming later)
Saga Vol 1 and 2 (by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples--review coming later)
Don't Call Us Dead (by Danez Smith--review coming later) 

Books I wished I hadn't bothered to finish and could get those hours of my life back:
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
The Book of Joan
Woman No. 17
The Burning Girl
The Power

Overall, in spite of having read some books I really didn't like, it's satisfying at the end of the year to see the list of books I lovedlovedloved is a lot longer than those I didn't. The 50-page rule is my friend. It may also mislead me into quitting some books too soon, but in the end, I'd rather find a long list of books I loved at the end of the year. So...how was your 2017 reading life?

Who Reads Poetry

Who Reads Poetry is a collection of 50 essays originally published in Poetry magazine. It's a lively collection that disputes the old stereotype that only English professors read poetry, and that poetry is a dying art. It also demonstrates poetry's power, particularly in difficult times; one essay records the memories of a Warsaw ghetto survivor, who used poetry as a way to remove herself from the horrors around her; another, by a war correspondent, talks about reading MacBeth (yes, a play, but a play in verse) while covering the war in El Salvador.

But not all reflect dire circumstances, which is entirely appropriate. Musician and songwriter Neko Case, in an essay titled "My Flaming Hamster Wheel of Panic about Publicly Discussing Poetry in This Respected Forum," writes: "Poetry is such a delicate, pretty lady with a candy exoskeleton on the outside of her crepe-paper dress. I am an awkward, heavy-handed mule of a high school dropout. I guess I just need permission to be in the same room with poetry." See? Even someone as amazing as Neko Case can find poetry intimidating.

Daniel Handler--he of Lemony Snicket fame--contributed a hilarious essay about finding the right time--and right amount of time--to read poetry. Hip hop artist Rhymefest talks about his life as a poem, and the poetry of rap. Retired US Army three-star lieutenant general and former West Point superintendent William James Lennox Jr. talks about why poetry is taught to cadets at West Point (something another writer touches on later). 

So, if you, or someone you know, wonders who exactly reads poetry these days, the answer is: A lot of people. And for many different reasons.