March 2013 Books

The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe
Published: 2012
Rating: 5
Goodreads

Last Friday, I was in NYC with my daughter.  We were going to the hospital to visit my father who is recovering from surgery, when we came out of the subway and lo and behold, there was Shakespeare and Company Booksellers on 68th and Lexington!

We stopped in and over $100 later, this memoir was in my stash of finds along with New and Selected Poems: Volume One by Mary Oliver, Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in it's Darkest, Finest Hour by Lynne Olson, On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf, Bound to Last: 30 Writers on their Most Cherished Books edited by Sean Manning and cute thank you cards with "Merci" and the Eiffel Tower on the front.  I also bought my daughter The American Heiress by Daisy Goodwin.

I had heard of this book, written by a son whose love of books was shared by his mother who had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  During the last two years of her life, they formed a "book club" that was born out of conversations around books during the multi-hour chemo treatments.

I read half of this engaging memoir that night: dog-earring, underlining and writing a list of interesting books that I might want to read in the front (before discovering a nice alphabetized list in the appendix), and read almost to the end while on the bus back to DC the next day.

I say "almost" because the last chapters were about his mother's death, and since tears were expected, I needed to be alone.  For I've learned that crying while reading is most free and cathartic when done in private.

Any bibliophile will love this book for it is a celebration of how books can impact our lives.  And how an "extraordinary, ordinary" (as he describes his mother in this interview) woman's love of the written word is passed onto her children and in her dying months, offers a common ground for conversations around such important topics as death, grief, family, faith, purposeful living, etc.

I especially like this quote about books vs e-books.

One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality.  Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind.  But printed books have body, presence.....I often seek electronic books, but they never come after me.  They may make me feel, but I can't feel them.  They are all soul with no flesh, no texture, and no weight.  They can get in your head but can't whack you upside it.

As his mother takes her last breaths, Will looks around and sees that she is surrounded by her books.

...."a wall of bookshelves, books on her night table and a book beside her.  Here were Stegner and Highsmith, Mann and Larsson, Banks and Barbery, Strout and Nemirovsky, the Book of Common Prayer and the Bible.  The spines were of all colors, and there were paperbacks and hardcovers, and books that had lost their dust jackets and ones that never had them.   

They were mom's companions and teachers.  They had shown her the way.  And she was able to look at them as she had readied herself for the life everlasting that she knew awaited her.  What comfort could be gained from staring at my lifeless e-reader?

She died on September 14, 2009 - almost 6 months after my Josh.  I applaud Schwalbe for writing this poignant memoir that will keep his mother's memory alive, long after her death.  Maybe this is why I continue to write on Josh's blog for I feel a similar need to keep his memory alive.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Published: 1945
Rating: 3.5
Goodreads

When this book was made into a British TV mini-series over 30 years ago, Jeremy Irons played the protagonist and narrator, Charles Ryder.  He also performs the audiobook that I picked up from the library.  It was a pleasure listening to his smooth, silky voice change pitch, tone and accent based on the various characters: best friend and lover, Sebastian Flyte; his beautiful independent sister,  Julia Flyte;  aristocrat, Lady Marchmain; Oxford don, Mr. Samgrass; fellow Oxford student, Anthony Blanche; Canadian rogue, Rex Mottram; injured German, Kurt; and society-conscious wife, Celia.

I kept the paperback in the car so when I heard a particularly beautiful sentence, phrase or description, I dog-earred the page; there are many.

So why a rating of 3.5?  While I loved the prose, I didn't particularly like any of the characters and so hardly cared what happened to them.  Additionally, while listening, I had many questions which I ended up writing on the first blank page of the book.  After completing the book, my questions remained.

It is more clear to me now that as a reader, I am subconsciously asking questions about the characters, situations, scenes, plot and story and expect these to be answered in some fashion by the end.  I may not like the answers but that is better than not having them at all.  Despite that, I enjoyed the language.  Here are some of my favorite quotes:

I found this passage beautifully written and so descriptive that I could see, taste and smell the berries, wine and smoke.

On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine...they were delicious together - and we lit fat Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian's eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger's breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.

Charles' first impression of Sebastian:

He was magically beautiful, with that epicene quality which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.

And of Julia:

Because her sex was the palpable difference between the familiar and the strange, it seemed to fill the space between us, so that I felt her to be especially female as I had felt of no woman before.  

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
Published: 2006
Rating: 4
Goodreads
Author web site

In the "For Readers" tab on her web site, Gillian Flynn talks about why she wrote this book:

Libraries are filled with stories on generations of brutal men, trapped in a cycle of aggression. I wanted to write about the violence of women.... I particularly mourn the lack of female villains — good, potent female villains....I’m talking violent, wicked women. Scary women. 

This is an interesting point; one which I had not really pondered.  As it happens, I am listening to the audiobook, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoesvsky and while driving home today from a local coffee shop, was listening to Raskolnikov's dream in which drunken men brutally killed a thin old mare who, being unable to gallop pulling a cart full of people, was sentenced to death via whip, thick wooden shaft and iron crow bar.  It was the drunken owner and his equally drunk friends who delivered the blows across the rib, back, face and even in the eyes (very difficult to listen to this violence and brutality) while the women laughed.

How would this have read if women were doing the beating?  It is difficult to imagine women being capable of this kind of senseless cruelty but Flynn would say they are and it is time for novelists to uncover this sordid fact.   If this is what she wanted to do, I would say she succeeded.  The antagonists in her debut novel are malevolent, horrible, cruel, evil females.  The consequences of their baseness on the poor victims is gut-wrenching.

Flynn's prose is succinct and concise - my borrowed paperback was just over 250 pages - easily read in two sessions; a haunting, psychological thriller.

Half a Life: A Memoir by Darin Strauss
Published: 2011
Rating: 4
Good reads

In the first sentence of his poignant memoir, Strauss says, "Half my life ago, I killed a girl."

Both he and the girl were sixteen years old.  It was ruled an accident so he was not charged; he was free.  But was he really?

Despite keeping this tragic event a secret for eighteen years, it haunted him.  But it wasn't until he was married and the father of twins that he finally started writing about it, resulting in this memoir.  There is much in this book that resonates with me; I plan to write a post on Josh's blog.

Here, however, are a few sentences that I really liked:

How he describes that irrevocable moment - like poetry:

Pretty girl on a bike, a shy little thud, hysterical windshield.  And I'm somewhere in there too, trying to swerve, trying to disappear.

Good analogies:

West Shore Road follows the turns of the Long Island Sound like a tag-along sister. 

At the church door I took a shaky gulp and wrapped my palms around the handles and my heart was a live bird nailed to my chest.

"The Man Who Loved Books Too Much" by Allison Hoover Bartlett

Published: 2009
Read: 2011
Genre: Non-fiction
Rating: 3
Reviews: Goodreads








This book reminded me of the recently read, In Cold Blood, as both authors found a relatively obscure story which was to be the subject of a magazine article but instead, became an obsession and a much bigger story, warranting the larger canvas of a book.

Because Bartlett chose to write in the first person (as opposed to Capote who wrote in the third person),  the reader is privy to her initiation into the world of rare book collecting.  She reads extensively of past bibliomaniacs and conducts interviews with the subjects of her book, John Gilkey, unrepentant, prolific book thief and Ken Sanders, rare book store owner and self-appointed detective, determined to bring him to justice.

We were all tenacious hunters - Gilkey for books, Sanders for thieves, and me for both of their stories. 

As she becomes submerged in the world of books and book lovers, she reminisces about the special books in her youth like Charlotte's Web:

For several days I lived in Wilbur's world, and the only thing as sad as Charlotte's death, maybe even sadder, was that I had come to the end of the book.  I valued that half-dream state of being lost in a book so much that I limited the number of pages I let myself read each day in order to put off the inevitable end, my banishment from that world.  I still do this. 

She explores the collecting obsession which is embodied in Gilkey, a man who will go to any lengths to realize his dream of owning a vast library of first edition books, and therefore being the envy of all:

Every collector, by definition, seems to be at least a bit obsessed, a little mad.....the accumulating never ends.  

While I have no interest in being a rare book collector, I did find this book interesting and a quick read.  My favorite bookish quotes are below and after reading, I spent some time thinking about my own obsession with books.

....books are historical artifacts and respositories for memories - we like to recall who gave books to us, where we were when we read them, how old we were, and so on. 

Books....root us in something larger than ourselves, something real.

Touring a personal library is a lot like going through someone's family photo album.

I love this quote from John Milton (1644) which says the soul of an author is in their book:

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.

Since Josh's death, books have become a vital part of my grief journey. Within their pages have come help and support from survivors of suicide who have courageously written their stories, from parents who have lost children, from memoirist writing about tragedies in their own lives, from fictional stories that explore the subjects of suicide, death, grief and mourning.

I have also expanded my reading to literary fiction in the quest to broaden my own knowledge and become a better writer.  I have become a more voracious reader as time goes on, on-track to read 100 books this year, an all-time high.  Finding books to add to my TBR pile is a newly found hobby.  For example, during our summer vacation on Cape Cod, my daughter and I found three used books stores and 18 reasonably priced books.  In Vermont, my favorite bookstore Northshire, had expanded their used book section and 14 new and used books were added to my take home pile, much to the chagrin of my non-bookish husband.

What can I say?  While always a book lover in the past, it has become an absolute necessity.  And now, because of Milton's quote, I am more cognizant and actually humbled to think that when I read a book and ingest the words, that I am taking in part of an author's soul.  Writing and reading are both sacred acts.

Bookish Quotes - updated 9/16/2012

A list of my favorite quotes about books, reading, etc.

• "A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."   (Penelope Fitzgerald: the bookshop)

• "Reading is a comfortable, solitary, slow and sensuous task."  (Alberto Manguel: A Reading Diary)

• "..every book exists in a dreamlike condition until the hands that open it and the eyes that peruse it stir the words into awareness."     (Alberto Manguel: A Reading Diary)

• "I will sleep one night in the library to make the space truly mine.  C. says this is equivalent to a dog peeing in the corners."   (Alberto Manguel: A Reading Diary)

• "Hovering over all the ruminations about literature and life that follow is the cosmic question of why so many of us feel compelled to go through life with our noses stuck in a book.  I'd like to propose....what we readers do each time we open a book is to set off on a search for authenticity.  We want to get closer to the heart of things, and sometimes even a few good sentences contained in an otherwise unexceptional book can crystallize vague feelings, fleeting sensations, or, sometimes, profound epiphanies....Readers, professional or casual, are alert to passages in a book that illuminate what was previously shadowy and formless.  In our daily lives, where we're bombarded by the fake and the trivial, reading serves as a way to stop, shut out the noise of the world, and try to grab hold of something real, no matter how small."  (Maureen Corrigan: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading)

• "The utter trust that exists between reader and author is like the trust between lovers."  (Erica Jong)

• "The central role of literature is the transmission of the details of human experience by artifice that intensifies aesthetic and emotional response."  (E.O. Wilson)

• "Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed."  (Michael Chabon)

• "Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we turn to books: to find words for what we already know."  (Alberto Manguel: A Reading Diary)

• "I recall the physical pleasure of coming to the end of my book and then daydreaming about the characters (if I liked them) for many days after, imagining their ongoing lives and other endings."  (Alberto Manguel: A Reading Diary)

• "That for me was the perfect nightmare, to wake up and discover that the place in which I kept my books had vanished, making me feel that I no longer was who I thought I was."  (Alberto Manguel: A Reading Diary)

• "Books, what jolly company they are."  (Siegfried Sassoon)

• "Book lovers always have to touch books."   (Maureen Corrigan: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading)

• "One of the most magical and liberating things about literature is that it can transport us readers into worlds totally unlike our own."  (Maureen Corrigan: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading)

• "...books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might become a newcomer but was never really a stranger.  My real, true world. My perfect island." (Anna Quindlen: How Reading Changed My Life)

• "My best friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read." (Abraham Lincoln)

• "A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us." (Kafka)

• "The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing." (G.K. Chesterton)

• "Books are the plane and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home." (Anna Quindlen: How Reading Changed My Life).

• "Books are the means of immortality: Plato lives forever, as do Dickens, and Dr. Seuss, Soames Forsyte, Jo March, Scrooge, Anna Karenina, and Vronsky." (Anna Quindlen: How Reading Changed My Life).

• "Explaining the moment of connection between a reader and a book to someone who's never experienced it is like trying to describe sex to a virgin." (Sara Nelson: So Many Books, So Little Time).

• "A book is a way to shut out the noise of the world. It is a way to be alone without being totally alone." (Sara Nelson: So Many Books, So Little Time).

• "Allowing yourself to stop reading a book - is a rite of passage in a reader's life, the literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a communion, the moment at which you look at yourself and announce: Today I am an adult. I can make my own decisions." 












(Sara Nelson: So Many Books, So Little Time)




• "My books are my secret lovers, the friends I run to to get away from the daily drudgeries of life, to try out something new and yes, to get away....my books are the affairs I do not have."












(Sara Nelson: So Many Books, So Little Time)




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"I cannot live without books."  (Thomas Jefferson)

• 







"When I have a little money I buy books.  And if any is left, I buy food and clothing." (Desiderius Erasmus)


• "When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness."  (Vincent Starrett)

• "The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait." (Anatoly Broyard)

• "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention." (Francis Bacon)

• "Books are the windows through which the soul looks out.  A home without books is like a room without windows." (Henry Ward Beecher)

• "A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life." (Henry Ward Beecher)

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone, whenever you felt like it." (Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger)

"The world is full of chaos and an artful novel satisfied our human desire for order..." and "the novel excavates meaning from the rubble of incomprehension."  (Tom Grimes in Mentor: A Memoir)


"Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?...Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?"  (Annie Dillard in The Writing Life)

"Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends.  That the book accompanies the reader forever, from that day forward, is part of literature's profligate generosity."  And later.... "I take it as an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside my forever."  (Pat Conry in My Reading Life)

"Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark -  readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how.  In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known, it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognized, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.  (Narrator in A.S Byatt's Possession)

All following quotes are from the short essay How Should One Read A Book? by Virginia Woolf

"The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions." 

"Do not dictate to your author; try to become him.  Be his fellow worker and accomplice.  If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read." 

"Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words."  

"To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.  You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination if you are going to make use of all that the novelist - the great artist - gives you." 

"I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards - their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble - the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy, when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward.  We have nothing to give them here.  They have loved reading."

"Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book.  People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment.  The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage." (Sara Crewe in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Little Princess)