Torch, by Cheryl Strayed

Teresa Rae Woods is in her late 30s; in a long-term relationship with Bruce; the mother of Claire (a senior in college) and Joshua (a senior in high school); the host of a hippy-dippy public radio program that ends with the exhortation "Work hard. Do good. Be incredible"; and a waitress at a diner in her small Minnesota town. Then she is diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Treatment proves futile, and she dies within months, as Claire and Bruce sit by her bedside and Joshua avoids the rest of the family, starting a career as a small-time drug courier and dropping out of school.

Following Teresa's death, Claire and Bruce join Joshua in a downward spiral. Claire, who has had a brief affair with a man whose wife was dying in the same hospital with her mother, breaks up with her boyfriend, drops out of school, and ends up working in the same diner where her mom was a waitress. Bruce first plans to commit suicide, then--apparently saved by a Kenny G tape--abruptly enters a relationship with a neighbor, marries her a scant three months after Teresa's death, and essentially drops out of Claire and Joshua's lives. Josh gets his girlfriend pregnant and spends time in jail.

Those who have read Strayed's much-ballyhooed nonfiction book Wild know that some aspects of the Woods family's experience mirror the loss of her own mother and subsequent dissolution of her family. This perhaps explains why the descriptions of Teresa's illness and death are both grueling and convincing. Unfortunately, I was unmoved by Claire, Joshua, and Bruce's experiences following Teresa's death--Claire and Joshua are in great pain, but I didn't really feel that pain. The chapters narrated from their perspectives seemed as flat and lifeless as the sappy "Work hard. Do good. Be incredible" tagline that runs through the book. The lifelessness is puzzling; given the devastation Strayed experienced after her mother's death, I would expect her to be able to plumb some serious depths. Yet I was not entirely surprised, since I found the descriptions of her emotional growth in Wild  lacking as well. It may just be that I am too prejudiced against Strayed to enjoy this book, but, whatever the reason, I wouldn't recommend it.

A History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters, by Julian Barnes

A History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters is a highly original work, a collection of 11 (or 10-1/2 if you prefer) short pieces--some stories, some more like essays--interrelated by several topics (ships, Noah, woodworm) and larger themes (history, love, the clean versus the unclean, and obsession). The stories are written in a variety of genres from epistolary to pseudo documentary to fable-like.

The first piece is a retelling of the story of Noah and the Flood, told from the perspective of a stowaway, one of the unclean that Noah rejected for passage on the Ark. The narrator (we learn near the end that it is a woodworm) not only despises the "monster" Noah, he points out the illogic of the Biblical story (how could all of those animals fit on a single ship--the ark was actually a small fleet) and the possibility that Noah and his sons had ulterior motives (providing a food supply for themselves post-flood).

The second chapter describes the hijacking of a cruise liner by Middle Eastern terrorists who not only kill passengers held hostage (Americans and Brits are sorted out to die first) but cleverly ruin the career of the story's narrator, an onboard entertainer/lecturer. The third chapter consists of a series of documents from a trial brought by a Catholic Church against a group of woodworms living in the church, whose activity has caused the bishop to fall and become an "imbecile."

"The Survivor" is set in a period following several nuclear accidents, when world war is at hand. The female protagonist sets out in a sailboat to search for an island safe from what she believes is a sure nuclear holocaust; toward the end of the story, however, she wakes up in a hospital, being treated by doctors who believe she had a breakdown because she broke up with her abusive boyfriend.

I won't describe all of the remaining chapters in great detail, but they include an analysis of a real painting and how it does and does not capture the events it depicts; the story of Jewish refugees aboard the St. Louis in 1939; letters from an actor to his girlfriend describing a tragic movie shoot in the South American jungle; the story of an astronaut who, while on the moon, hears God telling him to find Noah and his Ark; and a description of heaven, where the occupants define what it is they want to experience in the afterlife. The half-chapter is entitled "Parenthesis"; in it, the author directly addresses the reader, discussing (primarily) love.

I do not profess to understand all of what Barnes is doing or saying in A History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters, but it is both entertaining and thought-provoking. Must we love one another or die (Auden)?  Is love what will survive of us (Larkin)?  When history repeats itself, is the first time tragedy, the second time farce (Hegel)? Does myth describe or become reality?  If you want to be challenged while simultaneously being somewhat awed by the author's ability to cross genres impressively, then I definitely recommend this book.

Favorite passages:

Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions. 

The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old stories that sometimes seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connections. We lie here in our hospital bed of the present (what nice clean sheets we get nowadays) with a bubble of daily news drip-fed into our arm. We think we know who we are, though we don't quite know why we're here, or how long we shall be forced to stay. And while we fret and write in bandaged uncertainty - are we a voluntary patient? - we fabulate. We make up a story to cover the facts we don't know or can't accept; we keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them. Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history.

Best of 2014

I read a lot this year. Although the year got off to a somewhat slow start due to a crushingly huge work project and eye surgery that left my eyes too tired to read when I finally finished work for the day, work eventually slowed down (not an entirely good thing for someone who makes their living consulting) and reading picked up. I think I'm at 144 books for the year, including quite a few mysteries or other cruddy books that I didn't bother to write up on the blog, which leads me to another reflection. In reading Nick Hornby's Ten Years in the Tub, I was surprised to learn that the journal for which he reviews books, The Believer, does not publish negative reviews, instead focusing on "writers and books we like." Later in the year, I read Anne LaMott's Bird by Bird, in which she describes the ways in which negative reviews have affected her. I certainly do not want to crush anyone's spirit (I'm perhaps overstating here), so I have thought about only including books I liked on this blog. On the other hand, a word to the wise from someone whose taste is similar to your own can save a reader time and money. For that reason, I'm still reviewing both both books I like and those I don't, but I'd be interested in input if anyone cares to weigh in.

So that was a long introduction to this list, which definitely includes only books I like!

Best Novel 
Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill. This novel about marriage and a woman's undoing is unlike any other novel I have read.  Presented in a series of brief reflections, quotations, and anecdotes, the book is both harrowing and affirming. It's not for everyone, but it is wonderful.

Honorable Mention:  Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, by Chris Bohjalian; Amy Falls Down, by Jincy Willett; A Death in the Family, by James Agee; The Snow Queen, by Michael Cunningham

Best Short Stories
Nothing with Strings, by Bailey White. I just finished this collection by Southern writer Bailey White. While firmly set in the Southern story-telling tradition, the stories explore universal themes of aging and loss in humorous yet moving fashion.

Honorable Mention: Dirty Love, by Andre Dubus III

Best Nonfiction (Two Choices!)
The Warm of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson. Wilkerson uses three cases studies to make this history of the later decades of the Great Migration as readable as any novel.

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast. I'm not sure how Chast manages to be funny while talking about some of the most grueling and difficult moments of life, but she does. You may be laughing and crying at the same time, but you'll definitely respond to this amazing book.

Honorable Mention: Ten Years in the Tub, by Nick Hornby; Sous Chef, by Michael Gibney

Best Mystery
Big Little Lies, by Liane Moriarty. I'm not sure the author would call Big Little Lies a mystery, but there are a suspicious death and an investigation; the reader doesn't know what happened; and it's a bitingly funny satire . . . so I say it deserves this "win."

Best Poetry
The Perpetual Commotion of the Heart, by Norma Gay Prewett. Prewett is a friend whose poetry captures beautifully the poignancy of motherhood, of growing up financially poor but rich in love and noise, of aging, of life. Her poems are moving without being sentimental.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson was born in 1951 and raised in Des Moines, Iowa. I was born in 1950 and raised on farms in northern Illinois. Thus, many of the observations about growing up in the 1950s that he makes in this humorous memoir of childhood ring true. I must admit, however, that I was better-behaved than Bryson not, for example, having ever missed school double-digit numbers of days because I simply didn't like to get up in the morning and my mother wasn't inclined to make me do so, discovered that peeing on Lincoln Logs bleached them white (yes, any number of his stories are somewhat gross), or indulged in epic tomfoolery at movie matinees.

While Bryson portrays himself as being chronically in trouble and hated by teachers, his father (a sports writer) as monumentally tight-fisted and obsessed with isometrics, and his mother (also a journalist) as incredibly ditzy, his childhood was happy, in part due to the simplicity of the 1950s. Often, when he reflects on what made the era a good time to grow up and what made his own childhood happy, he seems to resort to listing--data on what made life in the United States enviable in terms of its ease, words heard in the 50s but not used now, predictions about the technological future, foods they didn't eat in their family, nonfood items he had tasted. While at first I found the lists kind of endearing, I eventually grew tired of them. Luckily, their frequency did decline as the book progressed.

Although the book does present a loving portrayal of life in the 1950s, Bryson is not foolishly romantic and, to demonstrate that fact, he includes sections in which he analyzes some of the shortcomings of the decade, including McCarthyism, the arms race, and racism. He also bemoans the rise of consumerism and the homogenization of American towns and cities.

I generally enjoyed the book and occasionally laughed out loud. One section that troubled me covered Bryson's move from an all-white elementary school to a racially mixed junior high. In a five-paragraph section intended, I am  sure, to be funny, he describes white kids realizing they would never be on a sports team again and tiny black kids so tough they could beat up larger white bullies. He follows this with a paragraph and a half about how there was really very little difference between black and white kids and everybody got along. Somehow the five paragraphs intended to be funny were not, and the subsequent paragraph and a half on racial harmony were unconvincing.

On the other hand, I did like the brief excerpts from Des Moines newspaper stories and historic photos that began every chapter. They were funny and suggestive of the tenor of the times.

Favorite passage:
We didn't call it the kitchen in our house. We called it the Burns Unit.

. . . I knew more things in the first ten years of my life than I believe I have known at any time since. . .. I knew what the world looked like when viewed through a Jell-O lens. . . . I knew pain the way you know it when it is fresh and interesting--the pain, for example, of a toasted marshmallow in your mouth when its interior is roughly the temperature and consistency of magma. I knew exactly how clouds drifted on a July afternoon, what rain tasted like, how ladybugs preened and caterpillars rippled, what it felt like to sit inside a bush.

Nothing with Strings, by Bailey White

Thanksgiving is not usually a day on which I'm listening to the radio, so I was unaware that Bailey White stories have been a mainstay on All Things Considered's Thanksgiving broadcast. In fact, I knew little about Bailey White, other than that she is a Southern writer. So when I downloaded this audio book containing 13 of her Thanksgiving-day stories, I had no idea what to expect.

The stories certainly have a Southern flavor--eccentric characters, Southern expressions, and references to Southern cuisine, traditions, foliage, etc. pepper the stories. But they have little to do with Thanksgiving and tend to end with unexpected twists that are not necessarily of the "sweet down-home" variety (both of these facts apparently irked a number of readers who reviewed the collection on Amazon). Some also have a development that might be supernatural--but might not be; readers/listeners have to decide for themselves. An example: In the first story, "Meals-on-Wheels," morning glories have gotten into Ida's house and are growing across the walls. The Meals-on-Wheels "girl" urges them to cut them down at the window where they have entered the house. But Ida is less concerned about the morning glories than about the fact that she sometimes finds Richard Nixon in the kitchen cooking eggs when she gets up in the morning; she realizes this is unusual enough that she shouldn't tell anyone else about it for fear of ending up in the Shady Rest Nursing Home. Then a new Meals-on-Wheels girl starts delivering her food, and she changes Ida's life. She loves the morning glories, replaces the jello in the meals with home-baked cake, and takes Ida on a picnic. Finally, the old Meals-on-Wheels girl returns and tells Ida there was no new girl who replaced her. So who was the girl? Was it a supernatural visitor, a figment of Ida's slightly addled mind, or a real person unknown to the old Meals-on-Wheels girl? We have to decide for ourselves.

Like "Meals-on-Wheels," a number of the stories have to do with aging and dementia. Others have to do with loss in different forms--loss of a mother, of the free-wheeling lifestyle of one's youth, of the small-town traditions that disappear when "development" comes to a community. These themes are universal, and I found White's treatment of them well worth the time I invested in listening. Note that the audio version of the book is narrated by Lorna Raver rather than by White herself, another fact that annoyed some Amazon reviewers. While Raver's Southern accent seemed slightly exaggerated, I didn't mind her narration.

Recommended, with awareness that these are not feel-good holiday stories.

Favorite passage:
The Meals-on-Wheels girl said, "You couldn't pay me to eat an egg cooked by Richard Nixon." [Okay, it's not a particularly graceful sentence or beautiful sentiment, but it matches my feelings about Richard Nixon exactly.]

Behind them Lily sat on the porch floor, playing with the reflection of the Chautauqua building in her mind. When the breeze died down and the reflection in the lake grew clear and distinct, she could squint her eyes and make herself believe that the reflection was the building itself. This seemed to make anything possible, and she went on to imagine ladies in white lawn and gentlemen in bowler hats strolling in the lake yard, a drunken monkey on a red leash, a blue mule, and a mysterious stranger with a black mustache. Then a little breeze would stir up the ripples, the reflection would slur, and everything would shift back to real. her mind would clamp down again, and there would be the banjo player on that cold, cold night, nudging her down the walkway and saying, "How could have you have thought it was that important?"  [This, I think, gives a real sense of White's writing and attitude.]

The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert

The Signature of All Things is the story of Alma Whittaker, a woman born in 1800 into a wealthy Philadelphia family. Her father Henry rose from poverty in England to prominence in the United States by figuring out how to make money through trade in exotic plants. The family home has gardens and greenhouses rivaling those of long-established European botanical gardens.

Alma, whose homeliness and large size Gilbert emphasizes repeatedly, is exceptionally bright and begins gathering botanical knowledge and developing her skills with a microscope at an early age. But when her beautiful but distant adopted sister Prudence marries an abolitionist schoolteacher and the man Alma loved married her mentally unstable friend Retta, Alma retreats to decades of intensive study of moss (and masturbation in a closet). When her mother dies, she adds management of her father's business affairs to her tasks.

Then she encounters an exceptional botanical artist, Ambrose Pike, and the two instantly become close friends, but things do not work out as either had hoped. Following the death of her father, Alma embarks on a journey to Tahiti. She develops "Theory of Competitive Alteration" to explain how species evolve. When she makes her way to Europe, her uncle, the head of a Dutch botanical garden, urges her to publish her paper explicating the theory, but she does not, worried that it does not explain altruism in humans, as exemplified by Prudence. When Darwin publishes The Origin of the Species, she takes it as validation of her work.

The Signature of All Things made many "best of 2013" lists, and there is much to admire in Gilbert's work. One can only imagine the extent of the research required to write knowledgeably about a range of botanical and broader scientific topics. Gilbert captures the tone of the 19th century in her writing style and conveys well the numerous challenges that a woman who wished to be a scientist faced in that era. Alma Whittaker, while fictional, must represent untold numbers of women who toiled unacknowledged in the scientific world. All of this notwithstanding, I found the book somewhat tedious--it's much too long and, at least for this reader, packed with too much botanical detail. While plant life and the scientific domain are well described (perhaps too well), the individual peoplein the story often act in inexplicable ways. Perhaps their motivations arise from a spiritual domain that I do not appreciate, but I found many decisions made by Alma and others unrealistic. Overall, I would recommend the book for people interested in botany or female scientists, but not for more casual readers. And I recognize most reviewers saw the book much more positively.

Favorite passages:
There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain become so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.

All I ever wanted was to know this world. I can say now, as I reach my end, that I know quite a bit more of it than I knew when I arrived. Moreover, my little bit of knowledge had been added to all the other accumulated knowledge of history--added to the great library, as it were. That is no small feat, sir. Anyone who can say such a thing has lived a fortunate life.

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast

Roz Chast is best known as a cartoonist and illustrator. With Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? she establishes herself as a gifted memoirist. She employs her characteristic cartooning style, handwritten text, photographs, and drawings to convey the pain and absurdity of the years preceding her parents' deaths.

Her parents were well into their 90s and still living in their apartment in Brooklyn when her mother Elizabeth fell off a ladder and was hospitalized for two weeks. Although Chast knew her father was suffering from dementia, the separation from his wife made the extent of the problem even more clear. Still, however, her parents refused to consider moving until her mother suffered another fall and her father got lost in the building while looking for help.

Chast moved her parents to an assisted living facility--The Place--near her home. She suffered the challenges of cleaning out their apartment and helping them settle into the new setting--and then watched first her father and then her mother die. Chast is incredibly forthright about the range of emotions she experienced during this process--forthrightness that can only help others going through similar experiences that they are not alone, nor are they crazy or evil!

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is a remarkable book about the end of life as seen through the eyes of the caretaking child of the dying. Chast can make you laugh and cry simultaneously while stunning you with her painful and admirable honesty. Highly recommended.

Favorite passage:
I wish that, at the end of life, when things were truly "done," there was something to look forward to. Something more pleasure-oriented. Perhaps opium, or heroin. So you become addicted. So what? All-you-can-eat ice cream parlors for the extremely aged. Big art picture books and music. Extreme palliative care, for when you've had it with everything else.

After my father died, I noticed that all the things that had driven me bats about him--his chronic worrying, his incessant chitchat, his almost suspect inability to deal with anything mechanical--now seemed trivial. The only emotion that remained was one of deep affection and gratitude that he was my dad.