An Embarrassment of Riches

What We're Reading Now

Wife murdered,
Complex spiderweb plot;
Husband speaks not.

Helen is reading Old City Hall, by Robert Rotenberg. Helen is a library assistant at the Central Library.

Double Pleasure - by Helen I seem to be at a crossroads in my life now and two books that I read recently have sparked me to do some deep examining. The first is a mystery by James Sallis called Salt River. His main character, John Turner is an ex-policeman, ex-con, war veteran and former therapist who wonders, "how much a man can lose and how much music he can make with what he has left."   

One of the characters talking about the troubles of a young man says that the boy had a hard life, "Not making apologies, and I know he brought a lot of it on himself. But there wasn't much that was easy for him, such that you had to wonder what kept him going." Turner then muses, "I had been wondering that, ever since I could remember, about all of us."

One thing that keeps me going is the pleasure I find in good writing, like this sentence spoken by Doc Oldham in Salt River, "Got more wrong with me than a hospital full of leftovers. Asthma, diabetes, heart trouble. Enough metal in me to sink a good-size fishing boat."

Part of the great pleasure of the second book, The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry, was listening to Wanda McCaddon read it on CD as I read it.  I sometimes read ahead of the recording; sometimes listened to fresh parts that I hadn't read, told in the narrator's rich Irish accent. What a nice way to enhance the reading!

The story reveals two very different versions of an Irish girl's life. Roseanne McNulty, once the most beautiful girl in all of Sligo, is incarcerated in the Roscommon Mental hospital. Now 100-years old, she is writing her life story and hides it beneath the floorboards in her bedroom. Meanwhile the hospital is preparing to close and her caregiver, Dr. Grene is evaluating the patients to decide which ones can be returned to society.  He begins to visit Roseanne and to listen to her story. He also discovers a document written by a local priest whose story of Roseanne is very different from her own tale. As they come to know each other, they uncover long buried secrets about themselves.

Roseanne says, "My father's curious happiness was most clearly evident in the retelling of this story. It was as if such an event were a reward to him for being alive, a little gift of narrative that pleased him so much it conferred on himself, in dreams and waking, a sense of privilege, as if such little scraps of stories and events composed for him a ragged gospel." 

I think that this is also true of Roseanne and the telling of her own story and how she coped with the events of her life. Along with her story, we are given glimpses of life in a small community in Ireland from the early part of the 20th century to the present time.

Roseanne and Dr. Grene come to respect each other. He says, "There has never been a person in an old people's home that hasn't looked around dubiously at the other inhabitants. They are the old ones, they are the club that no one wants to join. But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body."
   
Dr. Grene is also grieving the recent death of his wife."Too much thinking on death. Yet it is the music of our time. As the millennium passed fools like myself thought we were about to taste a century of peace." Roseanne observes him with compassionate eyes, "he was looking into that strange place, the middle distance, the most mysterious, human, and rich of all distances. And from his eyes came slowly tears, immaculate human tears, before the world touches them."

How can you go wrong with such lovely language!

Short and Sweet - by Helen I'm not much of a short story reader, but every once in awhile a story will strike my fancy. This happened with Ed McClanahan's hilarious story, "How's that again" in his book O the Clear Moment. Ed's wife has been after him to get a hearing aid, but of course, he is not ready to hear this. One day at the car wash, he discovers why he needs to listen to her advice.
    
    "I roll the window down halfway (for the purpose of telling him to stop mumbling, fer crissakes) and hear instead "Take your foot off the brake and take the car out of gear!" (as any competent audiologist can tell you, "put" and "take" sound remarkable alike under certain atmospheric conditions), but before I can sort out and obey these apparently contradictory instructions the car lurches forward - "lurch" is going to be the operative word from here on - and I see to my horror that rushing toward me is this great hideous spongy pink alien thing with long flabby tentacles slapping at my fenders, my hood, my windshield, and now these vile slimy pink tendrils are actually inside the car, flippetty-flappetty-flopping through the still half-open window, invading my personal space and flinging nasty car wash juices all over me and my glasses and my nice upholstery and my new goatsuede jacket, and I frantically trying to poke them back out with one hand while fumbling for the electric window button with the other, but the more tentacles I push out the more come flopping in behind them,... "

And you can imagine the rest.

Jane McCafferty's Thank You for the Music is another book to try. This collection of short stories is about the silences and the connections that can develop between strangers. My favorite is the story "Dear Mr. Springsteen" which shows how a love of music creates a momentary bond between an aging lonely white woman and an African American boy.

Happy Reading.  

Mystery on Martha's Vineyard - by Helen

Several summers ago, our friends invited us to spend a week with them on Martha's Vineyard. They rent the Joshua Slocum house for the month of August. I have since discovered the mysteries of two of the island's writers, the late Philip R. Craig and Cynthia Riggs.

Solving the mystery is not the point of these stories. Learning the lore of the Vineyard is. I find it fun to read references to the beetlebung tree, West Tisbury, East Chop, the ferry to Chappaquiddick and all the little ponds and side roads that are so much a part of the island.

Craig writes with a touch of humor and real love of the island, the fishing, and the swarms of summer visitors that clog the roads. His main character J. W. Jackson, a retired Boston cop, now lives year around on the island and does odd jobs to support his wife and two children. He loves to fish and to cook and to sit on the balcony with drink in hand watching the ocean. Jackson's signature saying is delish (either preceded or followed by a recipe).

In one of the books, Jackson drops by Victoria Trumbull's house to check on her reaction to a case that he is investigating. Victoria Trumbull is the 92-year-old detective in the mysteries by Cynthia Riggs. Victoria is a feisty character who uses her knowledge of  the feuds and families and forebears of the residents of West Tisbury to help out the local police.

In his latest book, Third Strike, Philip Craig has teamed up with William G. Tapply, author of the Brady Coyne mysteries. Brady, a Boston lawyer, gets a call from a former client who tells him about mysterious crates loaded and unloaded at midnight on the island. Coyne and Jackson team up to crack the case of a crime with international ramifications.

Delish!

"Observing with Passion" - by Helen In 1964, I started keeping a notebook of phrases, poems, and parts of books that I like. Needless to say, I have filled notebooks and still have little pieces of paper sticking out of books and tucked away in drawers. Years ago, I copied a poem by Mary Oliver called When Death Comes. I was particularly struck by this verse,

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

I like the idea of being "married to amazement".

When Winter Hours: A Book of Prose and Prose Poems by Oliver came across my desk, I had to read it.

One of the first things to strike me about her writing is how she sees, observes, notices -- and the quality of her sight. As I read further, I was on high alert to watch for more signs of seeing and sight. She says of other writers and thinkers, "Thus the great ones have taught me... -- to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always care-ingly."

Describing her own methods, she says, "I walk and I notice.  I am sensual in order to be spiritual. I look into everything without cutting into anything."

Another pleasure of this book is the essays on Poe, Robert Frost and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Mary Oliver is a close observer and reader. In her meditation on Poe, she states,"In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us. This is Poe's real story. As it is ours. And this is why we honor him, why we are fascinated far past the simple narratives. He writes about our own inescapable destiny."

One of the reasons that Mary Oliver is attracted to the poet, Robert Frost is that, "There is everywhere in Frost a sense that a man has time to look at things, to think and to feel." She writes a whole essay on Frost's two different messages, "everything is all right, say the metre and the rhyme, everything is not all right, say the words."  She feels that Frost writes of play and pleasure, wonder, reason and hope, "But the great height is not there. The sharp spilling of the soul into the whistling air- the pure spine-involved and organ-attached bliss - is not there."

Her own prose is often poetic, "The storm comes on an incoming tide; it therefore grows in power for the six hours of flashing tumble and shove toward us…. Indeed, what such fetch and wind in the rising tide do to the water of the surface is beautiful and dreadful. It shines, for the clouds are thin and racing by, and the light alters from gray to steel to a terrible flashing, a shirred, swarming surface."

Who can resist such stirring sentences!

Read it Yourself Poetry - by Helen and Alison Does anyone read poetry anymore? If I find a piece of poetry under my nose, I'm likely to read it. If I'm sitting on the bus, I will read it. If there's a poem in the newspaper, I'll read it. If it's stuck up on someone's cubicle wall, I will definitely read it. But I don't keep up with the latest in the poetry world.
I think part of the problem is that many poems are really meant to be read aloud, rather than being left to bounce around in the confines of our skulls. Hip hop artists and poets who perform in poetry slams have it right - to really appreciate the cadence, to savor the words, you have to hear it aloud. So in honor of National Poetry Month, here is our modest rendition of  "Book Lice" from Paul Fleischman's Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices. Do try this at home, or borrow the audio book and let someone read to you. (Listen to the podcast here. For more podcasts from the library visit http://multcolib.libsyn.com/)

Vicarious Journeys - by Helen

 Price of travelling too high? Take a vicarious journey of adventure this summer. Balthasar's Odyssey is a tale set in the 17th century, but several of the threads are oddly contemporary -- the differences between Muslims, Christians and Jews; the tug between superstition and reason, the fear of signs and portents.

Next year will be 1666, the Year of the Beast, and many communities are wrapped in fear and dread that the Apocalypse is near. Balthasar Embriaco, a Genoese bookseller and antique dealer, living in the Levant sets out to find a book called The Hundredth Name of God which many believe will reveal the secret name of God and will thus save the world from destruction.

The voice of Balthasar as he spins the tale of his journey from Gibelet to Constantinople, to Smyrna across the Mediterranean and on to London shortly before the Great Fire is a treat. A kind of braggart so proud of his family name and heritage, Balthasar entertains us with his journal of travels and travails, musings and romance. Described by one reveiwer as picturesque and picaresque, this novel provides much entertainment.

Since I've been thinking about traveling, I was delighted to find a new CD title called Selected Shorts: Travel Tales. These short stories are read (performed really), by acclaimed actors and actresses mostly in front of a live audience at the Peter Norton Symphony Space in New York City.

I was particularly delighted with Paul Hecht's reading of "The Hat of My Mother" by Max Steele, one of the travel tales from Selected Shorts. His pauses, pacing and the way he draws out certain parts of the sentences makes this humorous story come alive. I could picture the family gathered around the breakfast table the morning after Mother was kidnapped and safely returned. "I only want to tell this story once and I'd better not hear it repeated from anywhere outside the family", she says in a very firm voice.

There are currently 49 different Selected Shorts CD titles on a variety of subjects. Find a list here. Get one and listen for yourself.

Can you think of other vicarious journeys to recommend to the armchair traveler?

The Highly Introspective Detective - by Helen

Richard Yancey, author of The Highly Effective Detective has now written a sequel featuring his laughable, lovable, compassionate and bumbling private investigator, Teddy Ruzak. In The Highly Effective Detective Goes to the Dogs, Teddy's business is closed down by the state of Tennessee because he has failed to pass the P.I. test.

He befriends a homeless man and gives him his hat, which changes both of their lives. The next day Teddy discovers the body of this same homeless man in an alley outside his office and his conscience leads him to investigate the death. But it is not the investigation that intrigued me. Teddy is such a marvelous creation with a brain full of miscellaneous trivia, a habit of speaking in non-sequiturs, and a strong appreciation of the odd ball characters that he meets.

His interactions with his long suffering secretary, his wanting to adopt a stray dog, his questions and doubts about God and his care and compassion for the eighty-plus, Eunice Shriver, who has attached herself to him in order to write his biography, make him an endearing character.

Teddy says:

"I pulled a random page from Eunice Shriver's manuscript and read this:  
    You would think living alone would free me from all the normal burdens of responsibility that people complain or worry about, but all living alone does is increase your psychological weight, as if your soul were living on Jupiter. It tends to make you more important to yourself and exaggerate your problems to the point that they're insurmountable afflictions.
The passage got my heart rate up. Not only did it strike me as eerily prescient, it even sounded like something I would say. Either Eunice Shriver had found her way into my head or I had indeed found my way into hers."

Later, observing the big brown eyes of his adopted dog, Archie, Teddy muses, "I had read somewhere that God is to us as we are to dogs, that the gulf separating our intellects must be, if God is God, wider than the universe. Archie sensed I cared for him. He sensed his entire existence relied upon my tender feelings. But my thoughts were unfathomable, unknowable, and so he stared, unable to reach me except through signals as easily interpretable to me as mine were ineffable to him."
    
An unknown caller with possible information about the murder keeps calling Teddy, but remains silent. "'You know', I said into the phone, 'this is a little like praying. I talk and hope you are listening, and I don't expect a reply. At least, not a direct one. Look, I can't help you and you can't help me -- or yourself -- unless you tell me what you want. What do you want?'"

In trying to solve the murder, Teddy remarks, "I ascribed meaning to everything, even to things that had no meaning or no potential meaning…Life is pretty damned random, and maybe it was the randomness that terrified me."

I can sympathize. I spent a fun evening musing along with Teddy Ruzak, the highly effective detective.

    

Take a Chance - by Helen (Read)

Once in awhile, I like to take a chance on a debut novel, especially if I've seen a good review. Kate Morton's The House at Riverton was published to great acclaim in Australia and a best seller in Britain according to Library Journal. It is kind of an upstairs, downstairs book told through the memories of the now aged former servant girl and ladies maid, Grace.

Grace goes to work at Riverton house just before the first World War when she is only 14. She becomes the silent witness to The Game played by the son and two daughters of the house. Grace observes and comments on family secrets, glittering society and the world of the 1920s that is just on the cusp of vanishing forever.

I liked the author's descriptions, especially this one giving us a first glimpse of the young poet who figures so hugely later in the story, "Alone in the room, his dark eyes grave beneath a line of dark brows, he gave the impression of sorrow past, deeply felt and poorly mended. He was tall and lean, though not so as to appear lanky, and his brown hair fell longer than was the fashion, some ends escaping others to brush against his collar, his cheekbone."

Years later in the summer of 1924 during a party, this young poet shoots and kills himself at the lake near the house. The only witnesses are the daughters Hannah and Emmeline, and only they - and Grace- know the truth.

Grace, now a 98-year-old woman living in a nursing home, is approached by a filmmaker who is making a film of the events of that fateful summer of 1924. The meeting stirs up old memories and Grace recounts her observations of the events and ultimately reveals the truth.

I was particularly intrigued by the juxtaposition of the two stories - long ago events with the everyday life of 98-year-old Grace and her thoughts about the working of memory, "And I told you about the memories I've been having. Not all of them; I have a purpose and it isn't to bore you with tales from my past. Rather I told you about the curious sensation that they are becoming more real to me than my life. The way I slip away without warning, am disappointed when I open my eyes to see that I am back in 1999; the way the fabric of time is changing, and I am beginning to feel at home in the past and a visitor to this strange and blanched experience we agree to call the present."

Later Grace says, "I am slipping out of time. The demarcations I've observed for a lifetime are suddenly meaningless: seconds, minutes, hours, days. Mere words. All I have are moments."

I have a strong suspicion that this is the way memory is for my own 96-year-old mother.

The Story of the First Son - by Helen (read) The Everybody Reads project, focusing on Stubborn Twig, the story of a Japanese immigrant family, reminds me of another immigrant story I read not so very long ago -- All That Matters by Wayson Choy. It is 1926 and from the deck of a ship, Kiam-Kim, First Son, sees the distant peaks of Gold Mountain near Vancouver, British Columbia. He is three-years-old. He, his Father and Grandmother Poh-Poh have been sent away from their Toishan village to Canada to escape the famine and civil wars raging in China. Sponsored by Third Uncle, they are to find work and send back money to help the ones left behind. Every sojourner is expected to return to their home in China when things improve. As things happen, the family does not return to China, but settles into the Chinatown community in Vancouver.
This story of First Son growing up in the 1930s and 1940s Vancouver is filled with tales of Old China, ghosts, war, cultural divisions, “face” and family honor, ancient traditions and a mixed race triangle.
I liked the story so much that I next read The Jade Peony which is actually the first book in this family's story. Sister Jook-Liang dreams of becoming Shirley Temple and escaping the ways of old China; adopted Second Brother Jung-Sum struggles with his sexuality and finds his way through boxing; Third Brother Sekky, not comfortable with the old ways, plays war games with his friends. He comes to understand the tragedy of real war when his 17-year-old babysitter dates a Japanese man.
I later learned that 18 years after watching his mother die in a hospital, the author Wayson Choy received a phone call from a woman claiming that she has see his "real mother" on a streetcar. He recounts his search for the truth about his family secrets in Paper Shadows: A Memoir of a Past Lost and Found. This intriguing story complements and enriches the reading of his two novels.

From One World Passing to Another - by Helen (read) Have you ever started a book and thought, "I don't like these characters or the way this story seems to be developing." only to keep reading and by the time you arrived at the last page thought, "Wow, that was a good book"? This happened to me as I read the 2007 Giller Prize winner, Late Nights on Air by the Canadian Elizabeth Hay.

I didn't much care for the characters - Harry, the washed up station manager of a radio station in Yellowknife that is soon to be replaced by a television station; self destructive Dido who has fled her affair with her father-in-law and now is torn between two other men; Gwen, the newcomer, so unsure of herself, but assigned to learn about radio broadcasting by covering the late night shift; Eleanor, lonely and wondering if it is time to leave Yellowknife; Eddy, the charming, but secret misogynist; Ralph, "a man of books and pockets, and pockets stretched out of shape by books."

Disturbing emotional and sexual upheavals and undercurrents in the first part of the book almost made me quit reading. I persevered and came to realize Elizabeth Hay's power to cast a spell.

The characters interact against a backdrop of a great change that may come to the Northwest Territories. 1975 is the year that a judge is making an inquiry into the proposed construction of a gas pipeline across the Canadian North that would threaten the environment and the native way of life, the year before a television station begins to broadcast in Yellowknife, the year before great changes come to the area.

Inspired by a radio drama of John Hornby, who traveled throughout the Northwest Territory before starving to death, Gwen, Harry, Eleanor and Ralph embark on a canoe journey to retrace Hornby's route. In the descriptions of this journey, the whole area becomes another character in the book.  The book becomes a meditation on the fragility of life and love, and fighting against the odds.

Later, Gwen is musing on the fate of a forlorn fox who has invaded her urban neighborhood. "The phrase that came to her mind was 'the long and sudden of it.' We go on and on through the long months of our lives until we hit a sudden moment that stuns us...By the battle-scarred look of him, he'd been fighting against the odds for a long while...The fox had seemed magical to her. A creature from one world passing through another."

How perfectly she sums up this lovely book.
 

Travelling in Bible Lands - by Helen

I've found a good book for people who like to read travelogues. In the Steps of St. Paul by H.V. Morton is a gem. Not only is it a good introduction to the travels of St. Paul, but also a modern (1936) travel journey complete with humor and wonderful scenes of interaction between the author and the people that he meets.

The author is visiting the Turkish city of Konya and has found a modest-looking hotel owned by Russians:

    "At dinner that night a smiling, collarless waiter placed before me a roughly-hewn scrap of meat and potatoes which had been painfully cut into thin slices and then subjected, before a slight heating, to a bath in one of the more revolting oils. From the expression of eager expectancy on the faces of waiter, proprietor and proprietor's wife, I gathered that this was either a speciality or a death verdict. Sawing off a portion, I took an apprehensive mouthful, whereupon the waiter bowed, grinning all over his face, and the proprietor came forward and, also bowing, pointed to my plate, and said with some difficulty:
    'Beef-roast!'
    Then I realized that in this far-off place the pathetic sweetness of the human heart, that transcends all barriers of race, had devised a little compliment to England. I rose and told them in sign language that the meat was superb. They laughed and bowed with delight. And when the room was empty for a moment, a little hungry dog that had slipped beneath the table was a friend in need and -- in deed!"

And who can resist wanting to travel to the islands of the Aegean Sea after reading a description like this?:

"I have seen the islands of the Aegean dried up like last year's walnuts, seamed and wrinkled by the heat of the sun, their moisture sucked up and hidden in the fruit of the fig-tree, the melon, and the pomegranate. But in the spring these islands sing to the sound of torrents falling through pinewoods to the sea. They shine like emeralds, green with growing corn, with fig-leaves like green fingers held to the sun, with vine-leaves running over the ground like small green fires of the earth."

    Reading the introduction to In the Steps of St Paul by Bruce Feiler, I was reminded that he has written his own book of travels in Bible lands called Walking the Bible. It will be interesting to compare his viewpoint to the very British attitudes of H. V. Morton.
 

Baking a Cake? Do you know why....? - by Helen When baking a cake, do you know why room temperature ingredients are essential? The science is that "adding cold ingredients will cause the batter to "seize," or shrink and deflate, which will compromise the cake's texture, making it dense instead of light."

    This is just one of the many explanations in The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters. She is famous for using locally grown, seasonal vegetables at her Chez Panisse restaurant. This latest book is filled with her ideas about using the freshest ingredients, cooking simply and making the meal one of delightful togetherness. (And, she recommends tasting as you cook. What's not to like?)
    Nearly every chapter explains something about why we do this or that in the kitchen. Do you know any other books that explain the science of cooking or baking?

Slender Stories for Long Summer (and Fall) Days - by Helen

I've found another book to add to the library list Slender Stories for Long Summer Days.

Mr Fooster Traveling on a Whim: A Visual Novel by Tom Corwin is an allegory of a young man who ventures out into the world with a sense of childlike wonder, a letter from his uncle in his pocket, his compass and an old bottle of bubble soap. He muses as he walks along, "Why were ducks so fuel-efficient? How come you never see baby pigeons? Who figured out how to eat artichokes?"

It is a quirky little story with a series of surprises. It is about noticing, about paying attention and expanding the senses.

The expressive illustrations look almost like woodcuts. Created with ink pens and artist's brushes, Craig Frazier, the illustrator has added much to the charm of the book. He is also the illustrator of Stanley Mows the Lawn, which you'll find in the picture book section of your library.