Everything Happens for a Reason . . . and Other Lies I've Loved

I stumbled across the relatively brief book Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved and basically checked it out because "everything happens for a reason" is one of my least favorite bromides (right up there with "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger"--for a takedown of that one, see Christopher Hitchens' Mortality). The author, Kate Bowler, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer when she was 35, and she writes about that experience, how it affected her in innumerable ways, and how people around her responded (and various other things related to serious illness--but you get the picture).

The book was good, but what I liked even better is her podcast, "Everything Happens," in which she talks with people about what they have learned in the dark times in their lives. Three of the episodes that I found particularly meaningful (and I haven't quite listened to them all yet) featured conversations with Alan Alda, Lucy Kalanithi (widow of Paul, the author of When Breath Becomes Air), and pediatric oncologist Ray Barfield. Great life-affirming wisdom born out of great pain. I REALLY recommend the podcast: https://katebowler.com/everything-happens/.

Questions, Comments, and Rants: February Reading

Questions

I like to keep up with things my granddaughter is reading (my grandson loves mostly weird kid graphic novels, which I find less intriguing). This month I read two YA's--Tell Me Three Things by Julie Buxbaum and Turtles All the Way Down by John Green (granddaughter is on a major John Green kick). Reading the two in close proximity, I couldn't help noticing that dead parents are a key plot device in both books (the books are about much more but a dead parent is important to each). Then I started thinking about other YA or kids books with dead parents and wondering why. This prompted an interesting dinnertime conversation with the grandkids and their parents, with the kids getting very engaged in shouting out the titles books with dead parents (Harry Potter! Wizard of Oz! Cinderella!); the consensus around the table was that killing off a parent was a quick and easy way to provide a source of drama.

This isn't too far off what I read in an explanation of why Disney movies so often feature characters with dead parents. According to Disney producer Don Hahn, "One reason is practical because the movies are 80 or 90 minutes long, and Disney films re about growing up. They're shorthand. In shorthand, it's much quicker to have characters grow up when you bump off their parents. Bambi's mother gets killed, so he has to grow up. Belle only has a father, but he gets lost, so she has to step into that position. It's a story shorthand." (The other reason Hahn hypothesizes has to do with the death of Walt Disney's mother and isn't broadly relevant.)

Is this an effective device or a lazy shortcut? I tend to vote for the latter.

Comments

In February I read Ursula K. LeGuin's collection of poetry, So Far So Good, finished shortly before her 2018 death. I didn't love the poetry but I was intrigued by the list of financial contributors in the back of the book. It appears that the book was published through a version of crowd-sourcing (perhaps we might call it fan-sourcing). While I love that LeGuin's fans wanted to do this, it's sad that it would be necessary for a work by such an eminent author.

I also read Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann last month. It relates one of the most horrific stories of greed, betrayal, and evil-doing by humans that I have ever read. It's truly unspeakable--and it's only one of many terrible stories in our history. We should all be better educated about how the United States was built.

It's scary how much I forget. I look at the list of books I read this month and have already forgotten what some of them were about (this is especially true of mysteries). However, it was really weird to reread Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton this month and discover that I was remembering a totally different book (one of Nadine Gordimer's, I think). Sometimes I wonder if it is worth reading if I remember so little!

I love cookbooks, but I also like books about food that are contextualized within the author's personal life. Buttermilk Graffiti by Chef Edward Lee was exactly that kind of book, since his goal as he traveled to various locations sampling various ethnic/regional foods and talking with the people who make and eat them, was "trying to find my own America and where I belong in it." I enjoyed the book (except for a misplacing of Des Moines in Illinois) and was stunned by the amount of food Lee apparently ate on these forays around the United States. Just reading about it made me slightly queasy--but his writing also inspired me to think more deeply about my connections to food.

I finally read A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman and I don't quite understand why people like it so much. But I guess different people find their upbeat stories in different places. Some people like Fredrik Backman, some like Fannie Flagg; I like Elinor Lipman (she has a new book out--Good Riddance) and Elizabeth Berg. A chacun son gout. 

Rant

Michelle Obama's Becoming was the first book I read this month; I enjoyed it a great deal and respect the former First Lady's candor. My rant focuses not on the book but on a review that I heard, in which the reviewer reported enjoying the parts about Ms. Obama's childhood but finding the parts about her public life disappointing. This immediately reminded me of a situation years ago in which I went off on my boss for saying he enjoyed the parts of the film Malcolm X in which Malcolm was a criminal but found it boring when he became politically engaged. The racism in finding black people as criminals entertaining and as activists boring seemed obvious to me. Perhaps it's more subtle here, but I suspect the reviewer found the story of Ms. Obama's childhood interesting because she doesn't expect African American children to have "typical" two-parent, achievement-oriented, middle-class upbringings--puh-leeze! Meanwhile, the story of a black woman (and her husband) achieving is boring. That, too, is racism.

What Might a Psychiatrist Make of the Books You Read?

Several years ago, I read a novel about a young woman who set herself up as a therapist who based her insights on the songs stuck in her clients' heads. Perhaps the odd-ball approach might work as well as some other therapeutic tools. Maybe a therapist could get all the insight needed into one's issues/problems by looking at the books one reads.

This idea came to me as I perused the list of books I read in January. Despite the fact that I have said repeatedly that I should read fewer mysteries because most of them are pretty bad, this month's list was dominated by mysteries, most of which were pretty bad. What does this say about me? Am I hopelessly optimistic? Trying to make up for the lack of intrigue in my daily life? Lazy? I need a bibliotherapist!

Anyway, I did think one of the mysteries I read this month was quite good--Odd Child Out, by Gilly Macmillan. Two British teenage boys, best friends, sneak out after dark; one ends up being fished from a canal, the other is in a state of shock, unable (or unwilling) to speak. As the police try to figure out  what happened, the reader grapples with issues of adolescent friendship, childhood illness, immigration, and sexual violence. It's a mystery, but placed within a realistic context. I recommend it.

I also finished the Frieda Klein series by the husband-wife team that goes by the pen name Nicci French--at least I hope it was the end of the series. Psychotherapist Klein was an interesting character, but the authors dragged out the story line involving a serial killer that everyone but Frieda thought was dead over so many books that I became inappropriately eager for one of them to die (I'm sure a psychiatrist could make something of that).

In the non-mystery category, I enjoyed Night of Miracles, another of Elizabeth Berg's upbeat stories, and the poetry collection Monument, by Natasha Trethewey. The poems in Monument are far from upbeat, chronicling as they do the life experiences of African Americans, especially African American women, throughout history, from slavery to Hurricane Katrina. From the first stunning poem, about the murder of Trethewey's mother by her stepfather and the things people say to her about this trauma ("Do you think your mother was weak for men?"), the poet's personal story also weaves its way through the collection.

Some lines I particularly liked:

What is home but a cradle of the past?   

from "Prodigal 1"

. . . Lord, bless those hands,
The harvesters. Bless the travelers who gather

Our food and those who grow it, clean it, cook it,
Who bring it to our tables. Bless the laborers
Whose faces we do not see--like the grl
My grandmother was, walking the rails home:

Bless us that we remember.

from "Invocation, 1926"

The month's biggest disappointment was Liane Moriarty's Nine Perfect Strangers. I have enjoyed a number of Moriarty's earlier works for their wit and intricate plotting, but this tale of nine people being abused by the eccentric (if not crazy) owner of an expensive spa is just stupid.  Not a very  literary analysis, but . . .

The Best of 2018

2018 started with Conscience of a Conservative, by Jeff Flake, whose ideas about acting based on conscience rather than self-interest or party loyalty I liked; I liked less some of his votes this year (notably voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh) that didn't seem to follow this principle. Starting January with a political book established a theme for the year--a number of other analyses of political actors/issues followed, but none made the "best of" list. The year ended with Magpie Murders, a mystery I had somehow not gotten around to despite it having received a lot of attention when it was published in 2017; as always, I read a number of mysteries during the year, many of them rather bad. I read a little poetry, but not as much as I think I should have and nothing I loved. Short stories were also in short supply in 2018.

Fiction

I couldn't decide on a favorite so I picked two:

Overstory, by Richard Powers.  In this book, as in his earlier works, science is key to the narrative, in this case environmental science. The environmentalism may seem heavy-handed to some, but I did not find it so. I loved the weaving together of numerous characters with special relationships to trees (some are odd connections, such as the character who was saved by a tree when he fell out of a helicopter). As we proceed through the layers of the forest/sections of the book, their lives intersect in an effort to save the California redwoods, and we care deeply about the forest and the people.

The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai.  The Great Believers is told in two linked narratives, In the mid-1980s Yale and his friends are dealing with the frightening new epidemic killing gay men and the effect of HIV/AIDS on relationships of all kinds. At the same time, Yale is trying to acquire a collection of artwork from an elderly aunt of his friends Nico and Fiona. In 2015, Fiona is in Europe searching for her estranged daughter Claire; Fiona is staying with a friend from the old days in Chicago, who is mounting a solo exhibition of photos featuring the crowd from the 1980s. Makkai fills the book with wonderful characters and subplots but all the plots cause the reader to think about love, family, relationships, art, and cause-and-effect. 

Honorable Mention: The Story of Arthur Truluv, by Elizabeth Berg, which wasn't the deepest book but left me feeling good about humanity, a somewhat difficult task; The Female Persuasion, by Meg Wolitzer, a flawed but enjoyable exploration of feminism, friendship, and mentorship; Mrs. Bridge, by Evan S. Connell, which so vividly conveyed marriage in the years before WWII in a style that still feels innovative decades after the book was written.

Mystery

No mysteries really wowed me this year, but a few did stand out from the crowd of mediocre titles (I know, I should just get over series mysteries):

Magpie Murders, by Anthony Horowitz. Magpie Murders is a book within a book, with parallel mysteries in both. The narrator in the "real world" is Susan Ryeland, an editor whose most valuable author, Alan Conway, creator of the Atticus Pund detective series, has recently died--it looks like a suicide, but Susan comes to believe Alan was murdered. Her inquiry into his death starts as a search for the last section of his last novel, which was missing when her boss gave her the new manuscript to read; soon, however, she is investigating his death as well as contemplating what happened in the last section of the book.  The book is cleverly constructed and features some interesting word play and reflections on the writer's angst.

Honorable Mention: The Woman in the Window, by A.J. Finn, and Sunburn, by Laura Lippmann, both of which managed to surprise me more than once!

Rereads

I was going to call this section "classics," but I'm not sure the two titles I'm listing really classify. However, I loved each of them in two different phases of life, making them classics for me:

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath. First read in my late teens/early twenties, this wonderfully written novel provides a devastating look into how depression colors every aspect of one's life. The fact of Plath's subsequent suicide makes the book all the sadder and more compelling.

Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner. Angle of Repose is also beautifully written. It is a multi-level work, telling the stories of retired and wheelchair-bound historian Lyman Ward and the subjects of the family history he is writing--his grandfather, Oliver Ward, a mining engineer and inventor who was often mistreated and swindled by bosses, and his grandmother, Susan Ward, an Easterner disappointed in love and challenged in her Western life with her rough-around-the-edges husband. As Lyman constructs their story, largely from Susan's letters to her best friend, he reconsiders his own life.

Young Adult/Children's   

I feel blessed that my granddaughter loans me books she thinks I should read, but in 2018 I was alarmed that so many of the books featured bullies, mean girls, etc. My favorite from her recommendations was a classic:

Matilda, by Roald Dahl. Matilda is a very funny book about a gifted little girl who wreaks havoc on her horrible parents and the abusive headmistress of her school. Dahl captures the revenge fantasies every child must have felt, while still making Matilda entirely lovable.

I also want to note that the grandkids and I read Lois Lowry's The Giver together and really enjoyed reading and discussing it. We also watched the movie and discussed why the filmmakers would change the story in a variety of ways. A highlight of the year!

Nonfiction

Two books stood out for me this year, both having to do with the challenges of being a young person in our high-tech polarized world:

The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom, by Helen Thorpe. Thorpe tells the stories of a classroom of immigrant students at South High School in Denver, most of whom have come to the United States, with or without authorization, to escape terrible circumstances in their home countries. Once they arrive here, the challenges they and their families face--legal, financial, emotional, cultural--are huge, but their perseverance and the work of teachers and others who assist them in their journeys are inspirational. Thorpe's style of journalism, in which she immerses herself in her subjects' lives, is what we learned as "the new journalism" back in journalism school in the early 70s. For this kind of subject, it definitely holds up well even though it is no longer new.

Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, by Sherry Turkle. The author, a professor at MIT, examines how technology, especially smart phones, affect our creativity and ability to be empathetic, our friendships, family relations, education, work, politics, and how we treat the aging. I found it a fascinating discussion that I continue to think about, particularly as it applies to my work as an educator/curriculum writer, but also implications in daily life.

Performances

My son got me started with audio books a few years ago, and I am listening to them with increasing frequency. You can listen to a book while cooking, cleaning, playing Candy Crush, walking, etc. Normally I don't think too much about the performances (unless the narrator has a particularly irritating voice, some odd verbal tic, or a penchant for mispronouncing words), but two works stood out this year:

Black Man, White House, by D.H. Hughley and Michael Malice, performed by Keith Szarabajka, John Reynolds, Fran Tunno, Cherise Boothe, Dan Woren, P.J. Ochlan, Gregory Itzin, Paula Jai Parker-Martin, Mia Barron, Ron Butler, and James Shippy. Presented as a series of (fake) oral history interviews about the Obama campaign and presidency, Black Man, White House is hilarious--the writing is insightful and funny, but the performances make it laugh-out-loud funny.

Girls & Boys, by Dennis Kelly, performed by Carey Mulligan. Mulligan gives a tour-de-force performance (she was also in the one-woman play on Broadway and in London) of Kelly's play about a marriage, from the moment the husband and wife meet until the marriage ends, complete with career ups and downs and the births of two children. At another level, the play is also about culture, violence, and men and, as performed by Mulligan, is utterly gripping. I've listened to it twice, and a third listen is not out of the question.

Favorite Passages

Since I didn't post as often in 2018, it's not difficult to go back and peruse my favorite passages ("home" was something of a theme this year), so I think I'll just end with one from a book I just finished last week. It seems particularly relevant as we head into 2019:

Now would be a good time to be careful with the meaning of words.

     Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk

Books Set in Bookstores--Where Do These Fads Originate?

In the past three or four years, there seems to have been a plethora of books set in or around bookstores. I have read at least nine (Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, The Bookshop of Yesterdays, Paris by the Book, The Bookseller, The Bookstore on the Corner, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend, Small Blessings, The Bookman's Tale, and The Storied Life of AJ Fikry)--and two minutes spent on Amazon show there are more.

Sometimes when I notice what I think is a trend or fad (books written in first-person plural, with Shakespeare as a plot device, or exploring alternative futures based on small decisions), I think it's just a coincidence. But I have evidence that this bookshop thing really is a trend: at an author event, Cynthia Swenson, who wrote The Bookseller, when asked about the title of her book, replied that the publisher had told her she needed a title that signaled that the protagonist had a bookstore because books set in bookstores were "hot."

So how do these trends get started? Are people looking at trends in the culture and then writing books to match them? This seems unlikely, especially with bookstores, since all we've heard of late is that bookstores are dying. In fact, the opposite seems more likely--people decided to write books to try to increase the panache of bookstores. Still not probable. Perhaps it's just coincidence--a number of writers for no connected reason write books set in bookstores! Sadly, what seems more likely is that one person has success with a book set in a bookshop, and imitators jump on the bandwagon.

Any ideas?

BTW: Two of the books listed above stand out from the rest: The Storied Life of AJ Fikry, by Gabrielle Zevin, and the recently read Paris by the Book, by Liam Callanan. Paris by the Book is a bit of a mystery--Leah Eady's writer husband Robert has disappeared and she has moved her daughters to Paris in hopes of finding him there. Leah and Robert both love Paris (or the idea of Paris), Leah having been seduced by The Red Balloon and Robert by the Madeline stories. Leah ends up running an English-language bookstore, where she organizes the shelves by location, rather than subject or author. Meanwhile, she and her daughters surreptitiously look for Robert, rarely confronting the question of whether he might be dead. There's considerable sorrow in the story but also joy--and Paris! Definitely recommended.

And here's my description of The Storied Life of AJ Fikry from a few years ago:  Widower AJ Fikry lives above his small bookstore in a tourist town on an island off the Massachusetts coast. He drinks too much, carries only books he likes (he's not a fan of David Foster Wallace), and doesn't really like most of his customers. But then someone leaves a baby in the store and soon he's raising the child, dating a book rep, organizing a book group for police officers, and hosting author events. The book talk/gossip is fun and, although there are sad moments in the book, overall it leaves the reader feeling positive about humanity. Highly recommended.

If you haven't gotten in on the bookshop fad, I suggest starting with these two.

An Evening with Shanthi Sekaran

Last Saturday was the One Book One Broomfield author event featuring Shanthi Sekaran, author of Lucky Boy. Lucky Boy was a very timely pick for this year's One Book One Broomfield program, dealing as it does with immigration and the separation of children from unauthorized migrant parents taken into detention. The story has two protagonists. One is Soli, a Mexican teenager whose parents send her north with $5 and big dreams; the journey is treacherous in the extreme but she eventually arrives at her cousin's home in Berkeley. Her cousin, while not the most sympathetic of characters, takes Soli in and finds her a housekeeping job. Soli soon discovers she is pregnant, but keeps her job--her employers even let her bring her son Ignacio ("Nacho") to work with her. But then a day of disasters lands her in detention, starting a long battle for her freedom and custody of Nacho.

The second protagonist is Kavya, the daughter of immigrants from India, who lives in Berkeley with her techie husband Richi. Kavya has not lived up to her parents' expectations, going into the culinary field rather than a more prestigious career. As a result of the recession, she has gone from being the chef at a trendy pizzeria to working in a sorority house. Kavya and Richi are struggling to conceive; after a miscarriage, they decide to try adoption and are advised that they should start as foster parents. They end up at a foster home that needs to move one of the children in its care; coincidentally, Ignacio is one of those children. Although they were supposed to be considering a baby girl, Kavya falls in love with Ignacio (whom she dubs "Iggy"). For Richi, the transition to parent is less instant. Eventually, they decide to try to adopt Iggy, setting up legal and moral dilemmas for themselves and Soli.

Ms. Sekaran's discussion of the book and her experience in writing it was fascinating. She was inspired by a news story about a Central American mother who was trying to wrest her child from the U.S. foster care system. That inspiration launched her on a multi-year project in which she did extensive research to ensure that she was representing the story of unauthorized Mexican immigration accurately and with empathy. Since I don't have direct experience of immigration myself, I can't judge the accuracy--but it was certainly described as a grueling experience that required incredible inner resources to survive. In contrast, Kavya's story is more closely related to Ms. Sekaran's own lived experienced and perhaps that is what allowed her to inject some humor into that part of the story. This humor was welcome relief from a very intense story (one member of my book group couldn't finish the book because it made her so sad).

Surprisingly, the book was not quickly picked up by a publisher. In the midst of having a baby, Sekaran revised the book fairly extensively. She reversed the ending and added an entire subplot about Richi's work. Frankly, with all that was going on in the book, I could have done without Richi's work struggles--but if it helped get the book published, then I guess it was worth it.

In the Q&A part of the evening, Sekaran was asked about how she came up with the title. She reported that it was perhaps the fifth title she proposed (one of the less successful being Nacho!--with the exclamation mark) and she liked it both because of its layered meaning and its sound--she finds L, K, and B to be good sounds (I didn't quite get that).

I admired the OBOB committee for picking a book with some controversy in it--and Sekaran for directly addressing the alarming policy changes under the current administration in her talk--but I was sad to see that the library did not plan a discussion group around the book. While the discussions have not always been well attended, this is a book that cries out for conversation!

Unsheltered and Transcription

When you see that certain authors have new books coming out, you just get excited, right? For me, two of those authors are Barbara Kingsolver and Kate Atkinson, so when both recently dropped new books, I couldn't wait to snatch them up.

Before I had gotten very far into Unsheltered, Barbara Kingsolver's new book, I happened upon a couple of reviews, neither of which sounded much like the book I was enjoying.  One called it the "first major novel to tackle the Trump era straight on"--really? It's certainly (partially) set in the present and refers indirectly to Trump (as "The Bullhorn) and discusses his surprising rise, but it's so much more than that. The second review I saw called it a story of mother-daughter relationships--wow! A mother-daughter relationship is certainly part of the story, but so are mother-son, daughter-in-law/father-in-law, husband/wife (two of those), brother-in-law/sister-in-law, grandmother-grandson relationships. Piqued by these two reviews, I looked at what people were saying on Goodreads and found equally (to me) weird comments--"It's too much about plants" and "It's too whiny" are two examples. A reminder that the same book can be a very different reading experience for different people.

So what was Unsheltered to me? A good book about people struggling and the relationships and principles that sustain them in hard times. As I mentioned, half of the book is set in the present, half in the 1870s; both stories feature people living in a town in New Jersey established as a Christian utopian community but hardly offering a utopian home to our characters. In the 1870s, newly married science teacher Thatcher Greenwood is struggling with both a school administrator who restricts what he can teach and a wife who wants a higher status life than Thatcher can give her. Thatcher's house, which his wife's mother has "inherited" from a relative who has moved West is falling down around them and they don't have the money to fix it. Thatcher does have friendships that help him stand his ground, with his young sister-in-law; his nextdoor neighbor, naturalist Mary Treat (an actual historical figure); and the editor of the alternative newspaper.

In the present, Willa (a laid-off journalist) and Iano (a college professor whose employer went out of business due to financial problems) are also struggling with an inherited home that is collapsing, quite literally. While Iano has found a temporary position with a college in Philadelphia, the family doesn't have the resources to fix the house; they must get Medicaid to provide medical care for Iano's diabetic (and conservative) father and their baby grandson, whom their son--mourning the suicide of his partner--has left with them while he pursues business opportunities. Their underemployed daughter Tig, who also lives with them, is often a thorn in Willa's side, pointing out the failures of the older generation. Willa, too, has relationships that sustain her, in this case her marriage and a new friendship with the curator of the local history museum.

My description makes the book sound rather grim, but I didn't find it so--the ways in which Thatcher, Willa, Mary, and Tig find meaning amid difficulty were actually inspiring.

One small quibble: I listened to the audio book, which is read by Kingsolver. At one point when Willa is having an unsatisfying exchange with an African American social worker, she reports the woman saying "aks" rather than "ask" and then makes fun of that pronunciation. Honestly, that should be beneath both Willa and Kingsolver.

I was less enamored with Kate Atkinson's new book Transcription. I loved her two earlier books set during World War II (and before and after)--Life after Life and A God in Ruins, both of which played with the meaning of narrative and what a novel is in thought-provoking ways. Transcription is essentially a spy novel featuring a young woman protagonist; since spy novels have never particularly appealed to me, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I wasn't too excited about this book. The main character wasn't very believable to me--a weird combination of totally naive and very well read. And the twist that came at the end of the book seemed equally unrealistic.

So a thumb's up for Unsheltered and a thumb's down (unless you're a spy novel aficionado) for Transcription.  But I'll still be looking forward to Atkinson's next book.

Whose books do you particularly look forward to?