Joy of Reading...

Two quotes from a recently finished, hug-it-when-last-page-is-turned book...

A seasonal observation...
It was one of those perfect fall days when the air is cool enough to wake you up but the sun is also kissing your face.

Babies...
It's a good thing babies don't give you a lot of time to think. You fall in love with them and when you realize how much they love you back, life is very simple.

The Southwest Corner

An e-mail conversation about women who stay with us long after a book is finished led to Nan recommending The Southwest Corner and the story of Marcia Elder to me.  I requested it from my library, and when the book arrived I was thrilled with seeing this lovely first edition copy.

Do you remember when your library books looked like this inside the back cover?

And had lovely bookplates inside the front cover?

The illustrations, attributed to Robert Hallock, were wonderful. I found it interesting that in my library's vcatalog, Hallock's illustrations are referred to as "decorations." Here are two illustrations of Marcia Elder, herself, and another that's just lovely and peaceful to look at.

Originally from the East, Mildred Walker moved west and became known as "a prolific writer" who captured the "essence of rural north central Montana."   You may read more about Ms. Walker here.

Mildred Walker

Heart of the Matter by Emily Giffin

Heart of the Matter, the latest from Emily Giffin--what can I say?  I had a coupon and the cover is purple, and so went my pledge to library more/purchase less.

From Booklist (via amazon)
Tessa Russo is celebrating her wedding anniversary with her handsome husband, Nick, a pediatric plastic surgeon, when his pager goes off. At the hospital, he meets his new patient, six-year-old Charlie, who has been badly burned while roasting s’mores. Charlie’s mother, Valerie, a high-powered lawyer who has raised Charlie on her own, is wracked with guilt. As Charlie goes through various grafts and surgeries to repair the damage done to his face and hand, Nick and Valerie become close. Tessa, a stay-at-home mom who has misgivings about leaving her professorship, recognizes the distance growing between her and Nick but isn’t sure what to attribute it to or what to do about it. The premise is a familiar one, but Giffin injects freshness by getting inside both Tessa’s and Valerie’s heads and by making both sympathetic, fleshed-out characters. Giffin’s talent lies in making her characters believable and relatable, and readers will be enthralled by this layered, absorbing novel.

Passages
On becoming your mother
On Sunday afternoon, Nick, Ruby, Frank, and I are shopping for Halloween costumes at Target--our idea of quality family time--when I realize that I've officially become my mother.  It's certainly not the first time I have sheepishly caught myself in a "Barb-ism" as my brother calls such moments.  For example, I know I sound like her whenever I warn Ruby that she's "skating on thin ice" or that "only boring people get bored."  And I see myself in her when I buy something I truly don't want--whether a dress or a six-pack of ramen noodles--simply because it is on sale.  And when I judge someone for forgetting to write a thank-you note, or driving a car with a vanity license plate, or, God forbid, chewing gum too enthusiastically in public.

On what women do  (My comment:  They do?)
...all women compare lives.  We are aware of whose husband works more, who helps more around the house, who makes more money, who is having more sex.  We compare our children, taking note of who is sleeping through the night, eating their vegetables, miding their manners, getting into the right schools.  We know who keeps the best house, throws the best parties, cooks the best meals, has the best tennis game.  We know who among us is the smartest, has the fewest lines around her eyes, has the best figure--whether naturally or artifically.  We are aware of who works full-time, who stays at home with the kids, who manages to do it all and make it look easy, who shops and lunches while the nanny does it all.  We digest it all and then discuss with our friends.  Comparing and then confiding it is what women do.

My plot summary?  Take a single mother with a badly injured child and mix with a somewhat happily married renowned pediatric surgeon. Toss in a the surgeon's wife who's wondering "is that all there is," and you have the Heart of the Matter.

While Giffin explored in depth the single attorney mother and the former college professor housewife and made each of these characters evoke sympathy from me, I felt some annoyance that the story never really got inside the doctor's head to understand what he was thinking and feeling. 

Next time, I'll be strong and remember my pledge...or I'll just honestly admit that I may have aged out of this kind of story regardless of the come hither purple cover.

Rating:  2.5/5 (Fiction Scale)

Dedication:  For Sarah, my sister and lifelong friend

First line:  Whenever I hear of someone else's tragedy, I do not dwell on the accident or diagnosis, or even the initial shock waves or aftermath of grief.

Playlist
Lullaby of the Leaves, Vince Guaraldi
Unchained Melody, Righteous Brothers
Jupiter Symphony, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, Johann Sebastian Bach
Night Swimming, REM
Sarah Smile, Hall & Oates
Beck CD (unspecified)
Georgia on My Mind, Willie Nelson version

The Season of Second Chances by Diane Meier

Thanks to Lesa's Book Critiques blog, I found out about The Season of Second Chances by Diane Meier.  You can read Lesa's review here. 


From Kirkus Reviews
An oddly passive middle-aged academic switches colleges and comes alive to friends, feelings and a future, in this debut novel from Meier, wife of author Frank Delaney. Partnerless and all but friendless, 48-year-old Dr. Joy Harkness seems to have sleep-walked through much of her life, including a four-year marriage and another 12 teaching literature at Columbia University. But all that's about to change after she accepts a prestigious new post at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Meier's debut breezily mixes the influence of French aestheticism on Henry James with lighter humor and romance as she drops her not-quite-credible heroine into an irresistibly sociable new community in which Joy discovers a perfect if run-down house, falls foul of several campus Lotharios (known as the Coyotes), gets sucked into a spousal-abuse drama and finds herself acting as temporary den mother to four active little girls. Slowly she realizes she is enjoying what she had previously avoided: "the mess of including other people in my life," even stumbling on an unlikely partner in Teddy Hennessy, a gifted, self-taught house-fixer-upper burdened with a cartoonishly possessive mother. Leisurely in pace, intelligent and amiable in tone, the novel glides over its implausibilities, including Joy's paradoxes-simultaneously attractive and insightful while also isolated and unaware. Dodging predictability in the final quarter, Meier takes leave of her heroine in a happy place. An up-market, engaging, feel-good fantasy.

Passages
On Post-its
For days on end I had gone through these books in a whirlwind of desperation and excitement, marking pages with yellow Post-its.  They stuck out like messy tongues from every book, at every angle.
 
On the joy of books/bookshelves
There wre my books!  My precious thesauri, my Elements of Style and my rhyming dictionary; the Columbia Guide to Standard American English and Menckien's American Language; two great Arthur Quiller-Couches, On the Art of Writing and On the Art of Reading; Edward Sapir's Language:  An Introduction to the Study of Speech, Fowler's King's English (of course) and Bartlett (obviously) and Simpson's Contemporary Quotations.  There is T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, and Carl Van Doren, The American Novel.  Bulfinch and Brewer and Joseph Campbell, and--can you imagine?--Teddy found space for all eighteen volumes of my Cambridge History of English and American Literature....  Upstairs in my bedroom, still stacked on the floor and waiting for just the right bookcase and a moment of inspiration from Teddy, lay the books closest to my heart.  Every book by Henry James, every book by John O'Hara, every book by Edith Wharton, Nabokov and Updike.  Novels, short stories and plays by Faulkner, O'Brien, O'Neill, O'Casey and Fitzgerald.  Books full of the collected essays of Gore Vidal, most all of Truman Capote, all of Willa Cather, some of Flaubert, most of Zola, all of Tolstoy, All of Chekhov, all of Proust and Joyce and Meredith, all the plays of Arthur Miller, most of the plays of Philip Barry and J. M. Barrie, William Inge, Tennessee Williams, nearly all I could get my hands on of Stoppard and Caryl Churchill.  There were, of course, my Shakespeares....  There were biographies, auto- and otherwise, in the dozens, from Boswell on Johnson to a ghastly but fascinating Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel I could never make myself throw out.  I loved the way biographies on the shelf made your mind bounce around like a pinball, based on their proximity to one another:  Mary McCarthy to Whitaker Chambers to Anthony Burgess, Matisse to Moss Hart, Leonard Bernstein to Beethoven (or is it the other way around?), Isak Dinesen to Dawn Powell; and most were still in boxes, as were all of the poets.
 
On style
Did I have any style at all?  I was thinking of Donna in her tiny warm-up suits and Catsup in his heathery tweeds, Bernadette in her soft watercolors and vintage prints and Dan and Josie in their jewel-colored cashmere sweaters and their Hermes and Missoni scarves.  They all had clothes that represented them, clothes that looked like them.  I had clothes that were comfortable and didn't show stains.  Maybe these were the clothes that fit my personality, I thought glumly.
 
On Thanksgiving dinner aftermath
People return to the table to help themselves to more food, patting their stomachs and saying that they've already had two helpings of the stuffing or three of the squash, onion and apple puree.  Even covered with smears of cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, green beans, bits of meat, stuffing, gravy and puree, my grandmother's china looks beautiful.  It fills the room, as people have left their plates sattered about like leaves in autumn.  The pale robin's-egg blue border on the tiny pleats of Wedgwood porcelain feel as though they've always lived in this house.
 
I particularly enojed the way Ms. Meier used cultural, movie and TV references to set a scene. 

• Mamie Eisenhower bangs.
• Teddy had rewired the bell, and it sounded Andy Hardy old-fashioned in its deep electronic voice.
• The house was a large split-level ranch at the edge of a development I would have positioned somewhere between Leave It To Beaver and Bewitched.
• He had a kind of William Holden-in-Sabrina quality; sure of himself, but boyish.  Or Paul Newman in The Long Hot Summer.
• It's Aunt Elizabeth's house...Aunt Elizabeth's house from Bringing Up Baby.
• And my favorite, I decided that Philip Barry's line from The Philadelphia Story was the one to hold on to:  "The time to make your mind up about people is never."

I am glad that I was guided by Lesa's review of The Season of Second Chances and not the editorial reviews (Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, etc.) on bn.com and amazon.com because I would have missed a very delicious reading experience.  This book has one of my favorite things--detailed descriptions of interiors and dishes.  I loved picturing in my mind the transformation of Joy's house from an uninhabitable wreck to a fully restored Victorian--the colors chosen for each room, the furniture, and the dishes. 
 
It took Joy Harkness some time and a lot of emotion to find her comfort zone.  Her brother's long ago adivce held true in the end:  Long, long ago, when I was disappointed at some school friend's slight, my brother reminded me of an idea I've just remembered.  "Don't you get it?" Timmy said.  "No one is using the same yardstick.  Their idea of a full measure is rarely yours--or anyone else's."
 
Rating:  4/5 (Fiction Scale)

5/9/10 Update:  Click here to view an excellent post on Breaking the Spine where the author comments on the changes that take place in The Season of Second Chances.

6/10/10 Update:  Kristen at BookNAround has just reviewed The Season of Second Chances.  You can read her excellent review here.

8/12/10 Update:  Diane Meier has a post on Head Butler regarding The Season of Second Chances and Chick Lit? Women's Lit?.  Click here to read her comments.
 
Dedication:  For Sara-Owen and Frank

The Big Dirt Nap by Rosemary Harris

The Big Dirt Nap by Rosemary Harris is the second installment in the Dirty Business Mystery Series.


From Publishers Weekly
In Harris's cute second dirty business mystery (after 2008's Pushing Up Daisies), landscape designer Paula Holliday is thrilled when her TV producer friend, Lucy Cavanaugh, suggests an all-expenses-paid getaway for the two of them to the Titans Hotel in Connecticut wine country. Paula even wangles a Springfield Bulletin gig to write about the titan arum (aka the corpse flower) on display under glass in the hotel lobby because the bloom smells so bad. When Lucy fails to appear and the dead body of new acquaintance Nick Vigoriti turns up on the hotel's loading dock, Paula considers returning home. Det. Stacy Winters's investigation persuades a TV reporter that Paula is a person of interest in Nick's murder, but Paula is more worried she might become the killer's next victim. The nifty puzzle that unfolds involves Native American casinos, mysterious Russians and that stinky slow-blooming flower.


Well, "cute" isn't exactly an adjective I would use to describe this book.  Paula Holliday falls into the Stephanie Plum wannabe category--smart, snarky dialogue, sharply drawn characters.  My favorite of the supporting cast is Wanda "Babe" Chinnery, owner of the Paradise Diner.


I will probably put the third in the series, Dead Head, on my library reserve list but feel that I know enough about Paula that reading the first in the series, Pushing Up Daisies, won't be necessary.


Rating:  3/5 (Mystery Scale)

Making the Rounds with Oscar by David Dosa, M.D.

Some time ago there was a human interest feature at the end of the nightly newscast which featured Oscar the cat.  Once I saw that Dr. Dosa was publishing a book, Making the Rounds with Oscar, I added it to my library reserve list and eagerly awaited its arrival.

From Publishers Weekly
Dosa, a geriatrician with a strong aversion to cats, tells the endearing story of Oscar the cat, the aloof resident at a nursing home who only spends time with people who are about to die. Despite hearing numerous stories about Oscar's uncanny ability to predict when a patient's time is nearing, Dosa, ever the scientist, remains skeptical. Slowly, he starts to concede that there may be something special about Oscar. Dosa starts to pay more attention to the cat's decidedly odd behavior, noticing that Oscar seeks out the dying, snuggles with the patient and family members until the patient passes; with others, he smells the patient's feet, sits outside a closed door until admitted, or refuses to leave a dying patient's bed. Dosa discovers how powerfully Oscar's mere presence reassures frightened or grieving family. Ultimately, the good doctor realizes that it doesn't matter where Oscar's gift comes from; it's the comfort he brings that's important. This touching and engaging book is a must-read for more than just cat lovers; anyone who enjoys a well-written and compelling story will find much to admire in its unlikely hero.

Passages
On coping
Watching a loved one's health fail is hard.  Most families eventually find a way to accept it and move on.  Some can even do it with grace and dignity.  Mary always spoke of one son who was ceaselessly cheerful in the fact of his mother's dementia.  "How do you do it?" she asked him one day.  "Oh, I said good-bye to my mother a long time ago," he told her.  "Now I've just fallen in love with this little lady!"

On dog person vs. cat person
Ida looked up at me with a knowing smile.  "You're not much of a cat person, are you?"  "I can't say that I am, but I'm trying to be."  Then Ida openly laughed.  "I knew it!  I could tell you were more of a dog person.  You're too damn nice."

On Oscar's demeanor
He generally kept a safe distance and left my mother alone, but when he'd wander by and she would stop to talk to him, well, he stopped too.  He never stayed long and he never cuddled up to her--Oscar was more like a visiting dignitary than a house cat--but he always stopped as if to hear her out.  Visiting dignitary indeed.

On coping...again
"Because you want them back in the worst possible way...you just want your parent back, the one who signed the report cards, the one who made the Thanksgiving dinner.  But you can't."  Knowing that, and coming to terms with that knowledge, is really the most difficult part.  A relationship between two people is made up, for the most part, of invisible things:  memories, shared experiences, hopes, and fears.  When one person disappears, the other is left alone, as if holding a string with no kite.  Memories can do a lot to sustain you, but the invisible stuff of the relationship is lost, even as unresolved issues remain:  arguments never settled, kind words never uttered, things left unsaid.  They become like a splinter beneath the skin--unseen, but painful nevertheless.  Until they're exposed, coping with the loss is impossible.

On the reason for cats
I think it's one of the reasons we've kept cats at Steere House all these years.  The patients like them, for the most part, either because they hark back to some forgotten relationship they may have had with a pet, or maybe because they are non-judgmental.  A cat doesn't care what you do for a living or whether you're rich or poor.  A cat doesn't care if you're able to remember its name or if you're up to date with the latest news.  But we were beginning to realize that cats mean something to the families, too, long before Oscar started his vigils.  They seem to help reassure family members who enter into the nursing home with some trepidation.  For a lot of visitors, the reality of nursing home existence can be a rather harsh wake-up call.  All the more reason to take comfort in something familiar.  Even if it is a cat.

On how Oscar does it
"I feel like the more I learn, the less I know.  I mean, why does he do it?" asked Dr. Dosa.  "Who knows, Dr. Dosa?  There's probably some scientific explanation but in the end, does it really matter?  He's there when it counts."

On Oscar
Is it outlandish to suggest that Oscar, a cat residing on a floor where patients with end-stage dementia routinely die, has merely learned how to pick up on a specific smell emitted in the final hours of a patient's lifespan?  Perhaps, but I like to think of Oscar as more than a ketone early-earning system.  Ever since I was a child, listening intently as my grandfather read bedtime stories from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, I have imbued animals with human characteristics and frailties.  It could simply be that we see ourselves in them--the best of ourselves, sometimes.  On a floor where the staff has gone to great lengths to make the dying experience tolerable for the residents and their families, I'd like to think Oscar embodies empathy and companionship.  ...I don't really pretend to know the nature of Oscar's special gift--I am not an animal behaviorist nor have I rigorously studied the why and how of his behavior.  Whether he is motivated by a refined sense of smell, a special empathy, or somethine entirely different--your guess is a good as mine.  But I believe we can all learn from his example.

If you read this book, I am sure the stories of the Steere House residents and their families will stay with you for quite some time as will the mystery of how Oscar does what he does.  The news stories about Oscar made him into a bit of a Grim Reaper character; in reality, he is a welcomed comforter and companion.  The subtitle of the book, The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat, sums up what you need to know about Oscar who reminds us all to be present and to live in the moment every day.

I particularly liked the chapter pages with the paw prints:

Here's a glimpse of Oscar:

Rating:  4/5 (Non-fiction Scale)

One Good Dog by Susan Wilson

Tami Hoag in her back cover blurb for One Good Dog by Susan Wilson says, "Nowhere can we see the potential for our own redemption more clearly than in the eyes of our dog...." 

From Booklist
Adam March is a married father and successful businessman poised to become a CEO—that is, until the day his troubled past catches up with him. Soon Adam has lost his job, his family, and his house and is living in a lonely apartment working off his community-service sentence in a local men’s shelter. Adam’s story alternates with that of Chance, a former fighting pit bull who has escaped, lived on the streets, and is now back at the animal shelter. When circumstances require Adam to adopt and care for Chance, he comes to realize the joy and comfort of animal companionship. Adam’s and Chance’s tale is one of love, loyalty, and determination, as both fight to begin new lives and relationships.

Several times I was tempted to set this book aside because of some of the descriptions of events, especially in the chapters narrated by Chance, the dog.  I hung in there, however, and am glad I did.  This novel of responsibility, redemption, and love brought both tears and smiles.

Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware of giving your heart to a dog to tear.  -Rudyard Kipling

Rating:  4.5/5 (Fiction Scale)

Prime Time by Hank Phillippi Ryan

Prime Time is the first in the Charlotte McNally series by Hank Phillippi Ryan, a Boston investigative television reporter. Coincidentally, Charlotte is a 40-something investigative TV reporter for "Channel 3" in Boston; and in Charlotte’s character, Ryan has struck a perfect balance between a too-smart-for-her-own-good and too-ditsy-to-be-believable crime solving protagonist.

Product Description from Amazon
In the cutthroat world of television journalism, seasoned reporter Charlotte McNally knows that she'd better pull out all the stops or kiss her job goodbye. But it's her life that might be on the line when she learns that an innocent-looking e-mail offer resulted in murder, mayhem and a multimillion-dollar fraud ring. All too soon her investigation leads her straight to Josh Gelston, who is a little too helpful and a lot too handsome. Charlie might have a nose for news, but men are a whole other matter. Now she has to decide whether she can trust Josh…before she ends up as the next lead story.

An opening that pulls you right nto Charlotte’s story:
Between the hot flashes, the hangover and all the spam on my computer, there’s no way I’ll get anything done before eight o’clock this morning. I came in early to get ahead, and already I’m behind.

Describing a co-worker:
Her real name is Margaret Isobel DeRosiers Green, but on the radio she’s Maysie Green, sports reporter extraordinaire. She can hold her own in any locker room, and amazingly for the news biz, doesn’t possess a backstabbing bone in her body. She doesn’t care if the glass is half-full or half-empty—she looks forward to the fun of drinking the rest of it, and then the fun of filling it up again.

The Universe IMs:
I put the mirror back on its pushpin holder, and give it a conspiratorial wink. “Wish me luck, magic mirror on the wall,” I implore. It falls and crashes to the floor, scattering jagged shards of glass all over the rug. Ha-ha. Breaking news. The universe now has instant messaging.

Prime Time was a great first in the series, and I’m looking forward to the next two installments: Face Time and Air Time.

Finished: September 6, 2009
Rating: 4 (Mystery Scale)
Pages: 288
Publisher: Mira
Copyright: 2009
Format: Kindle

That Old Cape Magic

Much like memories of Cape Cod, Richard Russo’s That Old Cape Magic played with my mind as I travelled up and down Routes 6/6A and 28 with Jack Griffin. There’s something about the Cape that can do that. Are these the bright, cloudless days with hydrangeas a color of blue that can’t be described or the gray, misty days with everything hidden in rolling fog banks? Were the vacations there as happy and carefree as I remember them?

Book Description from Amazon
Griffin has been tooling around for nearly a year with his father’s ashes in the trunk, but his mother is very much alive and not shy about calling on his cell phone. She does so as he drives down to Cape Cod, where he and his wife, Joy, will celebrate the marriage of their daughter Laura’s best friend. For Griffin this is akin to driving into the past, since he took his childhood summer vacations here, his parents’ respite from the hated Midwest. And the Cape is where he and Joy honeymooned, in the course of which they drafted the Great Truro Accord, a plan for their lives together that’s now thirty years old and has largely come true. He’d left screenwriting and Los Angeles behind for the sort of New England college his snobby academic parents had always aspired to in vain; they’d moved into an old house full of character; and they’d started a family. Check, check and check.

But be careful what you pray for, especially if you manage to achieve it. By the end of this perfectly lovely weekend, the past has so thoroughly swamped the present that the future suddenly hangs in the balance. And when, a year later, a far more important wedding takes place, their beloved Laura’s, on the coast of Maine, Griffin’s chauffeuring two urns of ashes as he contends once more with Joy and her large, unruly family, and both he and she have brought dates along. How in the world could this have happened?

That Old Cape Magic is a novel of deep introspection and every family feeling imaginable, with a middle-aged man confronting his parents and their failed marriage, his own troubled one, his daughter’s new life and, finally, what it was he thought he wanted and what in fact he has. The storytelling is flawless throughout, moments of great comedy and even hilarity alternating with others of rueful understanding and heart-stopping sadness, and its ending is at once surprising, uplifting and unlike anything this Pulitzer Prize winner has ever written.

Passages
On happiness (real or perceived): …he’d tried but failed to keep his parents out. Right from the start (of the story, of his marriage), despite his best efforts, they’d managed to insinuate themselves. When Joy suggested they honeymoon on the Maine coast, Griffin convinced her that what they needed was a dose of the old Cape magic, that weakest of marital spells. In Truro they’d made plans for a life based on what they foolishly thought were their own terms, Joy articulating what she wanted, Griffin, tellingly, what he didn’t want (a marriage that even remotely resembled his partnes’, as if this negative were a nifty substitute for an unimagined positive). Even as he rejected their values, he’d allowed many of their bedrock assumptions—that happiness was a place you could visit but never own, for instance—to burrow deep.

Cape Cod vs. Coastal Maine: The rugged maine coastline was stunning, Griffin had to admit, the light so pure it almost hurt. He couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if his parents had fallen in love with this part of the world instead of the Cape. Certainly it would have been more affordable, but that begged an obvious question: would they really have wanted something they could afford? After all, much of the Cape’s allure was its shimmering elusiveness, the magical way it receded before them year after year, the stuff of dreams. Coastal Maine, by contrast, seemed not just real but battered by reality. Where Cape Cod somehow managed to vie the impression that July lasted all year, Maine reminded you, even in lush late spring, of its long, harsh winters, of snowdrifts that rotted baseboards and splintered latticework, of relentless winds that howled in the eaves and scoured the paint, leaving gutters rusted white with salt.

The perfect Christmas tree: Griffin came to understand that the perfect Christmas tree was a lot like the perfect house on the Cape, first because it didn’t exist in the real world, and second because all the imperfect trees fell into two categories. The first was the all-too-familiar Wouldn’t have It As a Gift, and the second applied to just one tree: Well, I Guess It’ll Have to Do.

Predictability: Late middle age, he [Griffin] was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming.

Being Plumb: …he became aware of an unfamiliar but extremely pleasurable feeling. How to describe it? Plumb. He was feeling plumb. Okay, may not completely, but no more than half bubble off. Plum some. As good as could be expected. He wondered if plumb might be another word for happy.

I struggled through parts of That Old Cape Magic I thought tedious. In retrospect, I realized that my reading of Griffin’s travels needed to be tedious while waiting patiently for him to sort everything out—the ties of parents, in-laws, friends, and career. In the end, it’s not the perfect Christmas tree, the perfect vacation destination, or perfection itself. It’s a "moment of grace" that comes unexpectly and demands that you sieze it.

Finished on August 14, 2009

Rating: 4/5 (Fiction Scale)

Pages: 261

Publisher: Knopf

Copyright: 2009

Format: Hardcover

Dedication: For Barbara, always

*****

While reading That Old Cape Magic, I spent a day with the GrandDogs. Louie (while he has learned to be very quiet) does not yet differentiate between good things to chew on vs. bad things to chew on. As Groucho Marx said, "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

Shelter Me by Juliette Fay

Shelter Me by Juliette Fay has received a lot of publicity in and around Boston not only because it’s a Target Bookmarked and Indie Next pick but also because Fay is a local author and local bookstores have the book featured in displays. Here is the back cover plot recap:

Four months after her husband’s death, Janie LaMarche remains undone by grief and anger. Her mourning is disrupted, however, by the unexpected arrival of a builder with a contract to add a porch onto her house. Stunned, Janie realizes the porch was meant to be a surprise from her husband—now his last gift to her. As she reluctantly allows construction to begin, Janie clings to the familiar outposts of her sorrow—mothering her two small children with fierce protectiveness, avoiding friends and family, and stewing in a rage she can’t release. Yet Janie’s self-imposed isolation is breached by a cast of unlikely interventionists: her chattering, ipecac-toting aunt; her bossy, overmanicured neighbor; her muffin-bearing cousin; and even Tug, the contractor with a private grief all his own. As the porch takes shape, Janie discovers that the unknowable terrain of the future is best navigated with the help of others—even those we least expect to call on, much less learn to love.

Passages

On letter writing:
Janie offered to scribe a letter for Beryl, who politely declined. “I’m very old-fashioned,” explained Beryl. “A typed letter is so cold and impersonal. It can be sent to so many people at once! Only a handwritten letter can convey the sense that the writer is actually with you, saying the words to you alone. When you write a letter with your own hand, you give a tiny piece of yourself.”

Janie, on recognizing her feelings:
It took a moment for Janie to realize that she was in the picture, too, standing to the side and a little behind Tug, her gaze directed toward him. She was smiling, but there was more than that. There as a look of…what? …’Gratitude’, she realized, studying the picture. ‘That’s me being grateful.’

On bridging emotional gaps:
Aunt Jude finished typing and glanced over at Janie. A look passed between the two women that, Janie realized, had never been transmitted before. It wasn’t about either of them or their struggles with each other. It wasn’t anger or disappointment or dismissal. It was a simple recognition of the real world in which they lived, both of them, together.

And for those of us who have traveled to the Cape with small children eager to get to Nana and Grandfather’s house:
“Pretty soon we’re gong to see a huge bridge, the Sagamore. When we cross over, we’ll be on Cape Cod. Can you watch for the bridge?” …When the Sagamore Bridge rose up in front of them like a metal giant looming out of the scrub pines, Dylan screamed in Janie’s ear, “I SEE IT!”

Marisa de los Santos has a blurb on the front cover of Shelter Me; and if you are a fan of her Love Walked In and Belong to Me, you’ll find much of the same satisfaction in Janie LaMarche’s story. Emotionally wounded and distant characters carefully and slowly come together; the children of the story do real kid things; friendship bonds disparate characters and makes other characters become stronger in their life journey; and mothers, daughters, aunts, cousins each grow in their knowledge and love for the other. One quibble: Some editing down from its 415-page length would have made this a 4/5 book for me.

Finished on February 11, 2009
Rating: 3.5/5 (Fiction Scale)
Pages: 415
Publisher: Avon
Copyright: 2009
Format: Trade Paperback

Dedication: For Tom, with great love.

Epigraph: None

Still Alice

Months ago, Still Alice by Lisa Genova was featured in one of the Boston-focused magazines—Improper Bostonian, I think. I clipped the article and had been carrying it with me, haunting every bookstore in a 20-mile radius to try to get it. As I found out, this original version was self-published and not likely to be found on the shelves where I was looking. Happily, Simon and Schuster published this book, and it is now easily found everywhere.

Kirkus Reviews
First novel efficiently showcases the experience of developing early-onset Alzheimer's. In 24 months, 49-year-old Harvard psychology professor Alice Howland exchanges the role of high-achieving teacher, wife and mother of three for that of a disoriented, inarticulate, forgetful shell of her former self. Stricken much earlier than most by this progressive, degenerative disease for which there is no cure, Alice loses her profession, independence, clarity and contact with the world with shocking rapidity in a narrative that sometimes reads more like a dramatized documentary than three-dimensional fiction. Genova, an online columnist for the National Alzheimer's Association, has a brisk style and lays out the facts of the disease-statistics, tests, drugs, clinical trials-plainly, often rather technically. The responses to Alice of her three grown-up children, who are also at risk of the disease; the struggles of her equally high-flying husband, a Harvard biologist; and Alice's own emotional responses, including fear, suicidal thoughts, shame and panic, are offered in semi-educational fashion, sometimes movingly, sometimes mechanically. Alice's address to the Alzheimer's Association Annual Dementia Care Conference is an affecting final public statement before her descent into fog and the loving support of her children. Worthy, benign and readable, but not always lifelike.

Favorite Passages
Alice sums up how we feel about winter here in New England…
On the night of Eric Wellman’s holiday party, the sky felt low and thick, like it was going to snow. Alice hoped it would. Like most New Englanders, she’d never outgrown a childlike anticipation of the season’s first snow. Of course, also like most New Englanders, what she wished for in December she’d come to loathe by February, cursing her shovel and boots, desperate to replace the frigid, monochromatic tedium of winter with the milder pinks and yellow-greens of spring. But for tonight, snow would be lovely.

As we all do, Alice thought of the books she could get to later…
She looked at the rows of books and periodicals on her bookcase, the stack of final exams to be corrected on her desk, the emails in her inbox, the red, flashing voice-mail light on her phone. She thought about the books she’d always wanted to read, the ones adorning the top shelf in her bedroom, the ones she figured she’d have time for later.

A reflection on being at the beach…
Alice watched the tide coming in, erasing footprints, demolishing an elaborate sand castle decorated with shells, filling in a hole dug earlier that day with plastic shovels, ridding the shore of its daily history.

An image of shadows on a living room wall…
The late afternoon sun cast strange, Tim Burton shadows that slithered and undulated across the floor and up the walls.

And this of babies’ feet…
Alice imagined holding them in her arms, their warm bodies, their tiny, curled fingers and chunky, unused feet….

Reviews from both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly pointed out Genova’s sometimes clinical and “clumsy” (Publishers Weekly) writing style. I might have approached Still Alice differently had I read these reviews first. However, I was immediately drawn into Alice’s shrinking world and appreciated all of the clinical information about Alzheimer’s and did not find it distracted from the text. I appreciated the “dramatized documentary” feel to the novel and thought the emotion of Alice’s story was well balanced with information about Alzheimer’s.

This mother/daughter exchange is something we mothers all would hope for, and is none the less hoped forl when the mother is descending into the isolation of Alzheimer’s:

“Okay, what do you feel?”
“I feel love. It’s about love.”
The actress squealed, rushed over to Alice, kissed her on the cheek, and smiled, every crease of her face delighted.
“Did I get it right?” asked Alice.
“You did, Mom. You got it exactly right.”

Finished on January 30, 2009

Rating: 4.5/5 (Fiction Scale)

Pages: 262

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Copyright: 2008

Format: Trade Paperback

Dedication: Iin Memory of Angie, For Alena

Epigraph: None

Every Last Cuckoo

If you’re looking for a fast paced, tightly plotted reading experience, perhaps you should pass on Every Last Cuckoo by Kate Maloy. If, however, you delight in meeting characters that draw you in to a very special time and place, then by all means join the cuckoos in the warblers’ nest.

From Publishers Weekly
When 75-year-old Sarah Lucas's husband, Charles, succumbs to an injury at the peak of a particularly brutal Vermont winter, her worst later-life fears of physical mishap are realized. In grief, Sarah's memories take her back to the Great Depression, when her parents generously opened their home to countless friends and relatives, and to her own regretted missteps as a parent. The chance to recreate the one experience and rectify the other arrives uninvited when a variety of lost souls--Sarah's own teenage granddaughter; an Israeli pacifist; a devastated young mother and child--seek shelter and solace in Sarah's too-empty home. The motley assortment of characters, many of whom have been touched by violence, deliver passionate apostrophes on peace and justice, and together Sarah and her boarders discover unseen beauty in the landscape, uncover hidden talents and develop a nurturing, healing community. Maloy's wordplay and startling nature imagery enchant….

Passages
A feverish Sarah grasping at memories…
Hot and cold, she set herself adrift, hoping to sleep again and fool whatever virus or toxin had invaded her. Soon she entered a suspended awareness in which she was conscious yet assailed by images her conscious mind did not produce. Where had she seen that piece of road, that sweet rise and bend that now unspoiled behind her eyes? The ocean, or perhaps a lake, lay to the right of it, a fringe of trees and a tucked cottage to the left. Up ahead, around a curve, a causeway crossed the wide water, but from where to where? Sarah tried to remember, but it was like snatching at milkweed fluff in the air. The very attempt sent it out of reach. This kind of thing happened more with age. Sarah was seventy-five. She had lived many thousands of days, so it was not surprising that scenes from an hour here or a moment there should surface at random. Her memories were beads jumbled loose in a box, unstrung. Everything—people, events, conversations—came and went so fast that only a fraction of the beads were ever stored at all. Few were whole, many cracked; most rolled away beneath pressing, present moments and were gone forever.

A description of friend Molly…
Molly was thought to be nearing ninety, a benevolent crone schooled in forestry, herbs, an gardens, a lifelong environmentalist, stooped and white-haired, with pink scalp showing at the crown of her large head. Her halo of white fluff inevitably brought to mind dandelion seeds, delicately spoked before the breezes carried them off. Molly had been big once, before the decades had shrunk her. Her broad knuckly hands were scarred and gnarled with use, but elsewhere her skin was heavy old silk, fine-lined and softly folded, bearing no spots or stains. She must have prized her rose white skin, the way she always covered it with long gauzy garments and broad hats in hot weather. It was her only outward beauty.

Thoughts on a gathering…
Everyone came, family and friends from Vermont and all over the country. Then they left. Sarah pictured the house swelling up with a deep intake of air, drawing tiny, weeping people in with its breath and then blowing them out mournfully to zigzag in the stinging cold. The inhalation held her aloft; the exhalation gave her some brief peace in its wake.

On grief…
Grief slipped away, only to attack from behind. It changed shape endlessly. It lacerated her, numbed her, stalked her, startled her, caught her by the throat. It deceived her eye with glimpses of Charles, her ear with the sound of his voice. She would turn and turn, expecting him, and find him gone. Again. Each time Sarah escaped her sorrow, forgetful amid other things, she lost him anew the instant she remembered he was gone.

Sarah, reflecting on aging…
Sarah took in the evidence of age not knowing whether to laugh or cry. How many girls and women she had been—she carried a multitude inside who shared only memory and character traits. I am a memory, she suddenly thought. And half the time I can’t tell what’s real from what I’ve made up. She slid her nightdress on and felt as if some other Sarah’s head emerged through the satin edging the neckline. As she buttoned the yoke, pushed up the loose sleeves, and brushed her teeth and hair, she had the odd feeling that some brand-new piece of her singular, shifting, multitudinous self had bumped lightly into place, moving the others making more sense of the whole—the irreducible, authentic Sarah, who weathered perpetual change and yet persisted. More would happen to her. She wasn’t finished yet.

A slice of daylight…
Tess helped her set the table. The late-day sun slanted in, lighting up the linens and place settings. Points of light caught on glasses, flatware, and ceramic glazes; the whole table glittered. Outside, fall color had burst wide open. Each year it was sudden, surprising, and new.

Sarah Lucas is a character who will live with me for some time. How often, of late, have I looked in the mirror and wondered just who that person staring back at me could be? How often, of late, have memories crowded in, demanding their space in my present? How often, of late, have I feared aging and inevitable separations? Sarah brings all of these fears and questions full circle, redefines her sense of self, and convinces that in the aftermath of inconsolable loss, life does go on…not the same, maybe not perfectly, but in some ways better.

The cover of Every Last Cuckoo beckoned, and I stepped inside the Vermont world of Sarah and Charles Lucas and emerged richer for having known them.

4.5/5 (General Fiction Scale)
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
277 pages

Dedication: For my mother, Elizabeth Hardy Maloy, and her mother, Bessie Watson Hardy, my first storytellers. For my aunt, Ann Foster Hardy, my inspiration for Sarah.

Run

On the surface Run by Ann Patchett is a simple story of two Boston families irrevocably linked by their personal histories, histories revealed moment by moment in the twenty-four hours following a traffic accident on a snowy evening.

From the inside cover flap:
Since their mother’s death, Tip and Teddy Doyle have been raised by their loving, possessive, and ambitious father. As the former mayor of Boston, Bernard Doyle wants to see his sons in politics, a dream the boys have never shared. But when an argument in a blinding New England snowstorm inadvertently causes an accident that involves a stranger and her child, all Bernard Doyle cares about is his ability to keep his children—all his children—safe.

There are any number of reviews and synopses of the story available at the usual on-line sources; however, I am not including any in this post lest too many details are revealed. The simple beauty of Patchett’s story is the reader’s own discovery of the families’ details, each as intricate and unique as the snowflakes falling on Boston as the story unfolds.

Passages of Note:

Religion and the uniqueness of Boston Catholicism is one running theme. Here, Doyle on the Cathedral of the Holy Cross:
They passed the Cathedral of the Holy Cross where Bernadette’s uncle had baptized the boys, where they made their first communions and first confessions with their grade school class, and where John Sullivan came back to say the mass for Bernadette when she died. …Doyle saw the cathedral as a joyless structure, the granite Gothic Revival so massive and foreboding that it was impossible to imagine that anything as light as faith had ever existed within its walls.

I love the imagery of this passage where two men, typical of Boston, are engaging in a discussion of team loyalty while pushing a hospital gurney to its destination:
The hallway was paved in cobblestones and they banged forth over them with inhuman violence while rattling through every conversation two men could have about basketball. Full-court and half-court pickup. NBA or college ball. Eastern versus Western Division. … “Celtics? Man, tell me you’re making this up. You could not be interested in the Celtics.” The man at her feet scolded back, “Loyalty,” he said. “Loyalty. Do you even know the word?” They chattered on like women, a basketball of happy banter thrown back and forth from head to feet. They weren’t even interesting to each other. It wasn’t worth the effort it took to make sense of the words and after awhile Tennessee stopped trying. She let the voices float above her like an unbroken string of lights. People came in and stood very close beside her, not speaking to her but laughing with the basketball men. …It went on this way until they reached some ground floor in hell. “Last stop,” the man above her head said in a jolly voice. They pushed her out and bumped into another hallway, this one congested with people like herself laid out on rolling slabs. That was when the two men left her. No goodbye. No good luck. She could only tell they were going because their voices receded, dribbled off towards the edge of her vision and then disappeared.

Father Sullivan contemplates the here and now vs. the hereafter. I’ll not spoil these passages for anyone by repeating long quotes here. Suffice it to say, they are well marked in my copy of Run. Father Sullivan concludes, “What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for Him.”

Kenya on owning the word “gentrified:”
Kenya took inventory of the empty window boxes, the slender birch trees in the sidewalks, the stair rails fashioned in ornate ironwork. Even in the snow it all looked orderly and neat. She knew full well how lovely it would be once the purple vinca made a carpet around every tree and the geraniums filled the boxes. “But it looks nice,” she said, coming to the street’s defense. “I can think of some places not too far from here that could stand to be gentrified.” To learn a word you had to know the definition, to own the word you had to use it in a sentence.

Typical of the Irish complexion:
Sullivan was fading. The honey-colored tan he’d brought home the night before seemed to be sliding into his socks, leaving behind a mass of darkened freckles on parchment backing.

~*~

I do agree with the many comparisons made between the snow falling in the Dublin of James Joyce and the snow falling in the Boston of Ann Patchett, each in its own way the perfect backdrop for an unfolding story—“snow faintly falling through the universe and faintly falling.” Snow, after all, does cover everything in a clean blanket of white, a blanket destined to be sullied and melt away to reveal once again that which we know to be real.

Patchett’s Bel Canto has been on my “must get to” list for some time now. The joy of having read Run coupled with Lesley’s review, has moved Bel Canto into top contention for next book off the pile.

4.5 of 5 (General Reading Scale)
HarperCollins 2007
304 pages

Dedication: To my sister, Heather Patchett and my stepmother, Jerri Patchett

The Maytrees

In prose as stark and bare as the landscape of Provincetown, Annie Dillard tells the life story of two young people who love and marry, befriend and betray, return and resolve.

From bn.com: Annie Dillard dives headlong into the deep, unfathomable mystery of married love in this lyrical novel -- only the second of her long, distinguished career. Set largely on the windswept tip of Cape Cod amid rolling tides and drifting dunes, the story is simplicity itself: A man and woman meet in postwar Provincetown, fall in love, marry, and have a child. Years later, one leaves the other in a bewildering act of betrayal that tests but does not break their transcendent bond; later still, their lives intersect again in an unanticipated twist of fate.

~*~

Looking at the copy of The Maytrees sitting on my desk, one would think that every single page boasted a brightly colored Post-It flag...not quite, but almost. Dilliard's beautiful (and sometimes challenging) language begs to be read, flagged, reread, considered and, ultimately, consumed.

Some favorite passages:

p. 3 ~ For a long time they owned no car, no television when that came in, no insurance, no savings. Once a week they heard world news on the radio. They supported striking coal miners' families with cash. They loved their son, Pete, their only child. Between them they read about three hundred books a year. He read for facts, she for transport. Nothing about them was rich except their days swollen with time.

p. 58 ~ Sometimes now Lou searched old albums to test her proposition that nothing so compels a woman as the boyhood of the man she loves. She saw a snapshot of boy Maytree in cap and knickers dwarfed by his cross-eyed father on a wharf. In the prints, Maytree's cap's shadow blacked most of his face. Here again he crouched on the beach, as at a starting block, between his hairy mother and his visibly half-dead grandmother, in a wind harsh with that present's brine. In those prints she saw unease in the boy, as if he had been scanning the offing for the man. No, it was she who sought for the man in the child. She could not find him, so the boy seemed to her lost in a deafening wind. The boy seemed--wonderfully--to need her without knowing it. But he did not, not yet. Perhaps, she asked later, he never did?

p. 89 ~ In late September, when Lou could stir at all she moved like a glacier, the queer sort at which dogs bark. Reading Hardy always distracted her in rough patches, as when her father vamoosed. Now she might enjoy the company of solid Farmer Gabriel Oak. She read, "It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in." ... She had no force to fight what held her as wind pins paper to a fence. She was a wood horse, a rock cairn, a jerry can of pitch. She found herself holding one end of a love. she reeled out love's long line alone; it did not catch.

p. 96 ~ Perhaps every generation passes to the next, to hand down to yet more chldren, an untouched trunk of virtues. The adults describe the trunk's contents to the young and never open it.

p. 108 ~ Just as few men love their wives so much as their daughters, few, if any, women love anyone so much as their children. ...often she missed infant Petie now gone--his random gapes, his bizarre buttocks. How besotted they gazed at each other nose-on-nose. He fit her arms as if they two had invented how to carry a baby While she walked, he patted her shoulder in time with her steps. If he stopped patting, she stopped walking. If his pats speeded up, she stepped lively. ...Later she washed his filthy hair and admired his vertebrae, jiggled his head in toweling that smelled like his steam. She needled splinters and sandspur spines from his insteps as long as he let her. Every one of those Peties and Petes was gone. That is who she missed, those boys now overwritten.

p. 189 (as I can never resist even a passing reference to a favorite poet) ~ He and Lou used to have a way about them he recalled vividly. One man loved the pilgrim soul in you. Would she be thinking such a thing?

~ * ~

The Maytrees was an exquisite reading experience, one that I shall revisit often in the pages of my mind.

Harper Collins, 2007

216 pages

Rating: 5/5 (General Reading Scale)