New Century Reading

Walking Home

Well, this is a delight. Before he became Britain's Poet Laureate in 2019, Simon Armitage was already a well-known and highly regarded poet in his home country when he decided to do something unusual for him: Go for a long hike. Specifically, he would hike Pennine Way, a trail of great beauty, but also intensely rugged and often in less-than-ideal conditions, including rain and fog. 

Not only was Armitage not much of an athlete, he decided to go against conventional wisdom and do the route from north to south, when guides advocate for the reverse. To up the stakes, he decided to approach the hike from the old tradition of the wandering troubador--he would do poetry readings every night along the route, if locals could provide him the space to do so along with food and shelter.

Armitage's memoir on his experience is wry and self-deprecating as he confesses to missteps and miscalculations, as well as readings that go well, and those that don't. He is met on the trail by various people, some known to him, some not. He gets lost (a frightening aspect in an area that's remote and not well marked) and has too much gear. He learns about the flora and fauna along the way, appreciating it as best he can given the circumstances. 

There's a lot of charm to this book, and for me, much of that charm came from the respect people in Britain have for poets (an ancient tradition there). He gets good crowds at most of his readings. People drive in from long distances to hear him speak, and some join him on the hike. He's a bit of a celebrity. Imagine, a poet being a celebrity! 

I so enjoyed his amiable wanderings, so much so that I started to look at Minnesota maps to see if I could do something similar. But: I'm not a celebrity poet. I also break out in hives at the thought of camping out with strangers night after night. And having to be social at the end of days where I might hike 10-15 miles. Which is to say, it's not going to happen for me. And that's one of the reasons I'm glad Armitage wrote about his experience, so I could live vicariously. 

Whhat You Have Heard Is True

Poet Carolyn Forche's memoir of her time spent learning about El Salvador as the country was reaching crisis state in the 1970s requires some patience. There were sections in the middle that felt long and repetitive, and yet I had the feeling that she was building to something bigger. I was right.

It's a story that's hard to believe, in some ways. As a young woman barely started in her literary career, she finds a man named Leonel at her California doorstep one day, with his two young daughters. Forche had worked on translating poems by one of Leonel's family members, and he comes to her with an odd proposition: Come to El Salvador. You're a poet, come and write about it. You wonder how the war in Vietnam started? Well, in El Salvador you now have the chance to see the beginning of that type of conflict.

Forche ended up going, against the advice of most of her friends. There, she finds that Leonel is intent on showing her all aspects of El Salvador, from its military leaders and religious leaders (including then Monsenor Oscar Romero) to the poorest, most wretched members of society. She asks Leonel why he's showing her this, and he replies again and again, you'll soon see, you'll soon understand. 

it's not until a trip to a squalid prison that Forche begins to get it, although describing what "it" is proves difficult. But that trip to the prison is beginning of an avalanche of events that lead to the deadly civil war that went on for 13 years. Her own life is at risk more than once, although nothing like the danger Leonel is repeatedly in. Yet it's Leonel who ends up helping to orchestrate the eventual peace in 1992.

As I said, there are scenes that feel repetitive, and more than once I found myself getting frustrated, both at Leonel for holding so much back from Carolyn, and at her for not forcing the issue, but being so passive. Yet I think in the end, she learned more that way than she might have being pushy. 

The book also serves as a reminder that we really, really don't want the U.S. to become the kind of country El Salvador was then, with people disappearing and either not showing up ever again, or being found brutally tortured and murdered, with no way to lawfully dissent. A timely reminder indeed.

If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now

In 2015, Washington Post writer and data cruncher Christopher Ingraham wrote a story about data that analyzed the beauty and livability of various areas around the U.S. and ranked them. According to the data, Red Lake Falls, MN, was the ugliest place to live. (Part of that determination came from the wicked winters they get in the northwestern part of Minnesota. Also, there is neither a lake nor a waterfall in Red Lake Falls.)

Minnesotans weren't having it, especially not those in Red Lake Falls. They invited Ingraham to visit and gave him the grand tour. The surprising thing is perhaps not that he found Red Lake Falls to be actually lovely; the surprising thing is that he fell for the area, hard, and talked his wife into uprooting their lives in Baltimore with their twin toddlers and moving to this small town kind of in the middle of nowhere.

This was a big leap in so many ways. There were many pros: greatly reduced cost of living; no more nasty commutes (WaPo agreed to let Ingraham work remotely); a yard their sons could play in; peace and quiet. But there were potential cons too: Such a remote area would not have the amenities like fine dining, medical facilities, possibly schools of the sorts they expected to have in the Baltimore area. 

They decided to give it a year or two and see what happened. Turns out, the pros outweighed the cons, so much so that they decided to have another child, a decision that wouldn't have even been thought about back in Maryland. And he decided to write about this big turn in his family's life. 

Ingraham has a sunny writing style, and is more than willing to make fun of himself (there are several misadventures where he disregards the advice of long-time residents and lives to regret it). I wish he'd had more of his wife's point of view in the story, because when she appears, she's smart and funny and not afraid to take him to task when he's being stupid.

There are some aggravating things. The writing in place is a bit rough. More annoying to this born-and-raised Minnesotan is that, even though making snap judgments about things is what caused this whole situation to occur, he still makes sweeping generalizations without thinking that maybe there are parts of Minnesota that are different than Red Lake Falls. He has several pages about how awful the food is, and he seems to imply the whole state has no decent taste for food. I'm sorry for him that Red Lake Falls is home to bad tater tot hot dishes and lutefisk, but boy howdy, Minnesota is so much more than that overall when it comes to food, and not just in the Twin Cities metro area. I wrote for a local food website for a few years, and I can say with confidence that there is absolutely a lot more going on. He does the same thing when it comes to politics. On the one hand, he dismisses the stupid stories the media does on political beliefs in rural areas and breaks down why they aren't trustworthy. But he still seems to think that what he sees in Red Lake Falls is the same as the rest of the state. Nope. 

Other than that, though, this was an entertaining read, and good on the Ingrahams for being willing to see the potential and make the leap.

All the Lives We Ever Lived

What a lovely book this is. Katharine Smyth is an enormous fan (as am I) of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. But her love of the book took on a deeper meaning when her father is diagnosed with cancer and begins a long period of treatment and recovery, recurrence and more treatment, until it becomes clear he's not going to live. She loves her father to pieces, but he's far from perfect, and her parents' relationship has had more than its share of struggles.

So she returns to the Woolf novel, and begins to explore her parents' relationship as well as the nature of grieving, viewing it all through the lens of Woolf's artistic achievement in that slim book. It's not a stretch at all, and Smyth has done her homework, reading not only the novel, but biographical and critical material, which she shares. Yet the book is far from academic in feeling. It's an emotional exploration of a difficult subject, insightful and at times heartbreaking.

I don't know how well this would read if the reader hadn't already read To the Lighthouse. Smyth does explain a great deal of the book (and there are spoilers), but still, I think it'd be easier to read it, as I did, with sighs of remembrance and appreciation.

And now excuse me, for I want to go read Lighthouse again.

The Happiness Playlist

Mark Mallmann is a Twin Cities-based musician, rather loved locally. The Happiness Playlist is a slim (130 pages) memoir of his battle with anxiety and depression after the unexpected death of his beloved mother. It's not a self-help book; he's not prescribing. He's simply telling his story, as simply as he can.

And that's this book's strength. As a musician, Mallmann already has a powerful connection with music. When traditional approaches to dealing with mental health don't cause an improvement (and it's clear he has a strong support network of friends and his loving father, which just emphasizes the difficulty of dealing with mental health in the best of conditions), he creates a playlist called the Happiness Playlist and listens to that exclusively for months. All the music on it is, as you'd expect from the title, happy; musically, it's wide-ranging, including songs by Cab Calloway, Sly & the Family Stone, Olivia Newton-John, Mariah Carey, Bob Marley, Rufus Wainwright, Judy Garland, Prince, Pink, Randy Newman, and Lizzo, among many others. Over the course of many months, he listens to his playlist, discusses many of the songs on it with his friends (not all of whom approve of his inclusion of Pharrell Williams' Happy, but Mallmann stands by it), continues to try to produce his own music, and work through his grief.

This is not a book drenched in despair. I think that also helps dispel the myth that someone suffering from depression and anxiety must be completely nonfunctional. Some are; but not all. Mallmann is stumbling into finding how to cope with the blow life has given him. Many of the scenes are brief and not tempestuous; there's a set of cooking scenes where he learns how to use the slow cooker his father has sent him and create wondrous soups (and one particularly disastrous one). There are hard days, and there are the good ones for which he has enormous gratitude.

This is a kind, gentle book. No promises of healing are made, no grandiose "look at me!" attitude. Just one man's story, filled with his love for his family and friends, and his love of the Twin Cities, which features prominently (to my joy). 

Maybe one of the best things about reading this book comes with thinking about what I'd put on my own Happiness Playlist. Mallmann and I have some overlapping taste. I for sure would include the White Stripes' We're Going to be Friends; Prince's Paisley Park (and I'd include Starfish and Coffee too); Lizzo's Good as Hell; and even Mariah Carey's Fantasy. Beyond that, I'd be inclined to add things like the Carolina Chocolate Drops' Your Baby Ain't Sweet Like Mine, Preservation Hall Jazz Band's That's It, and the Monkees' Gonna Buy Me a Dog. So there you go--several happy-making songs right here. What would be on your list?

Mallmann has since put his Happiness Playlist on Spotify, although it's altered somewhat from the one listed at the end of the book. He also produced an album called The End is Not the End (the title is a quote from the book), about working through this process too. 

If you or anyone you know struggles with grief, anxiety, depression--and loves music--you might appreciate the company of this book.

Hourglass

This slim book is a treasure. It's short, but covers a vast amount of territory. As the title implies, it's a meditation on time, viewed through the specific lens of marriage. Shapiro  has broken the book into short vignettes that move back and forth in time, sometimes touching back on a previously mentioned topic with newly gained insight. She looks at the mystifying question that so many people face: How does marriage work? Why do some last, and not others? How does it change us? What does it take?

The answer, of course, is there is no one answer, or that the answer is going to vary from person to person, couple to couple. Shapiro has seen both sides of the equation. She had two short marriages before wedding her current husband, to whom she'd been married (at the time of this book) almost 19 years. Why did this one stick?

And what about other family relationships, the parents and children? How do those work and not work? 

On the surface, Shapiro's life sounds glamorous; she and her third husband are both writers. He used to cover war, but ended up staying in the US to do screenwriting, a dangerous profession in its own way. She's the sought-after memoirist and teacher who has taught all over the place. They live a life of quiet in rural Connecticut. Yet, just as it is for so many other marriages, under the surface, there's a lot going on. Financial instability and insecurity. The worries over a young son with a deadly illness. Watching older family members deteriorate and die, and trying to come to terms with fraught relationships with them.

It's amazing to me that she could get so much in so few pages. It's a lovely, thoughtful read. I got it from the library, but will likely buy a copy to read and mark up at will. 

Inheritance

It's almost becoming a familiar tale: Woman takes a DNA test on a lark and learns, to her shock, that the man she thought was her father was, in fact, not her father. Which also makes her half-sister no longer a sister at all. But for Dani Shapiro, the story was just starting to get weird. 

I generally avoid spoilers, but I'll just give a slight one and say that if you assumed Shapiro's mother had an affair, well--nope. That's not how this genetic story plays out. In this memoir, Shapiro takes us through the emotional--and scientific--journey of her unexpected DNA results. To say that it rattles the foundation of her world and life would not be an understatement. It also takes her into deep research in areas she'd never expected to be interested in, nor would she have expected them to have any relevance to her own life.

Along the way, she examines her childhood, in which she was the blond child of dark-haired Jewish parents, a child other people frequently said, "You sure you're their child? You look Christian." She was raised Jewish and grew up rooted in that community. So finding out that her biological father was blond and Christian answers a lot of questions--but raises many more. Understanding what makes a family, what makes her family through many generations, is at the heart of this book.

I can't imagine the emotional toll both living and writing this story took. If I have one quibble, it's that she seems to dismiss the formerly half-sister and what appears to have been a strained relationship with her. Apparently Shapiro has written more about that relationship in other memoirs, but it could have used a closer examination in this one. 

But if you've ever wondered about whether getting DNA results might lead to uncomfortable findings, this book is worth the read. I've never personally been tempted to have my tests done. For one thing, I'm the spitting image of my father. There's no question of our biological relationship. But even knowing that, this book led me to think I'm better off leaving well enough alone. 

The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 4

This is the penultimate collection of diary entries for Mrs. Woolf. Volume 3 was one of the most delightful--it covered the years she wrote To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, a time of her growing strength as a writer and self-confidence in what she was doing. Volume 4 is a bit less ebullient. She's working on The Years, taking much of the time of this volume, in fits and starts, good days and awful ones. She also loses several people who were important to her and begins the tentative process of trying to write a biography of one of them (Roger Fry).

On a more ominous note, the political situation in Europe is worsening. Woolf still clearly remembered the ravages of WWI. And yet, perhaps not surprisingly (if you, like me, think what's happening in the US right now is akin to what happened in Germany during these years), she doesn't seem to fully grasp the threat or where it might lead. 

At least, not until 1935, when she and husband Leonard (Jewish) take a driving trip onto the mainland that takes them through Germany for three days:

"People gathering in the sunshine--rather forced like school sports. Banners stretched across the street 'The Jew is our enemy' 'There is no place for Jews in--'. So we whizzed along until we got out of range of the docile hysterical crowd. Our obsequiousness gradually turning to anger. Nerves rather frayed. A sense of stupid mass feeling masked by good temper."

And now I go to the final volume, with more than a little trepidation--I mean, I know how the story ends. 

My Own Devices

If you're not familiar with her, Dessa is a Minnesota-raised rapper, singer, and writer who performs solo and also with the group Doomtree. She's wildly talented, creative, and intelligent. So I came to her memoir in essays, My Own Devices, not sure exactly what to expect.

It's definitely not a tell-all in the honored tradition of celebrities, although there is a long and tortured romance that is recounted here with another Doomtree member whom Dessa does not name, but calls X. That seems a little coy, given that Doomtree doesn't have thousands of members. But after a while, it doesn't matter. Instead, it becomes clear that it was a relationship that too many of us have experienced: the on-again, off-again, can't-quite-give-them-up type of connection. Finally, Dessa, who is seriously into science, begins to wonder if her brain would respond to neurofeedback sessions to break her addiction to X. That, of course, makes her relationship unique--not too many of us have come up with that solution.

The book is largely about her journey through this relationship, but it's also about her family, her life, her struggles to gain a sturdy position in the notoriously difficult and fickle music scene. Dessa is never dull, but is a born storyteller with a sharp eye for detail, such as when she describes a New Orleans concert by the types of footwear people are wearing, and why that's different than she's used to in other cities.

I really enjoyed this book and getting to know Dessa this way. That said, I think I would have liked it a little better if there had been less about X and more about her creative life, how she writes music, how she collaborates with Doomtree versus writing/performing on her own, etc. That's not the book she chose to write, and I respect that. But I hope someday she does write that book.

All the Wild Hungers

When Karen Babine's beloved mother was diagnosed with cancer, she sprang into action the best way she knew how: with food. From those difficult months of surgery, treatment, setbacks, and recovery, Babine pondered life, family, and food, and from that came this beautiful book, a hybrid of memoir and essays. 

Each chapter, or essay, is short (some only a page) and focused on one particular idea or memory. That gives the author room to roam, with a momentary conversation or event leading to a wide-ranging set of thoughts and explorations:

"Are we our own unique beings or not? Science would suggest we are not. We exist within systems, networks, the matrix of family and friends, patterns. We are not alone. We are all connected, even on a cellular level, across time, space, and logic. Perhaps it is individuality that is the myth."

But along with heady thoughts like these, Babine introduces us to her growing collection of thrift-store cast iron pieces, even Le Creuset (who brings Le Creuset to a thrift store, she wonders), each piece of which has been named: Agnes, Estelle. She's a vegetarian, not so much opposed to eating meat as concerned about the treatment of animals and the environmental consequences of factory farming. But that doesn't stop her from collecting bones to make bone broth in an attempt to find something her mother, sick from chemo, can eat. She roasts chickens and makes elaborate Julia Child beef dishes. She also spends quality kitchen time with her nieces and nephew ("niblings," she calls them), firmly believing that her role as their aunt should be loving and attentive. She talks about her plans for the Holy Week of the Kitchen (March 14, Pi Day; March 15, the Ides of March; March 16, St. Urho's Day; and of course March 17, St. Patrick's). 

Throughout there's love, and fear, and anger, and guilt, and the return always to the kitchen to deal with all these things, and the memories of food that are tied up with family, and the need for normal when things are not at all normal: 

"Cancer simply requires that we articulate ourselves differently, reorienting our language as we become intimately aware of the words we use. We come to understand the idea of 'cancer-adjusted normal,' that what might have constituted a bad day a year ago is actually a truly good day today. We don't ask how are you doing? anymore--we ask how is today?"

A lovely book, thoughtful, and thought-provoking.