Book Club, Take One

A few months ago I had planned to “link up” to a friend’s blog to answer the question, “What do you do right, as a mother?” 

I thought about it.  And thought.  And thought some more.  And then, I kinda gave up. 

This is not to say that I feel like I’m a shitty mother.  Most days, I think I’m pretty good at my job.  (And it is a JOB, people.  Make no mistake.)  I run on a hamster wheel of meal preparing and school shoe shopping and teeth flossing and bike riding and piano practicing and t-ball cheering and board game playing and homework helping and library frequenting and Girl Scout cookie selling and…you get the drift, because most of you do the exact same thing.  I simply decided I didn’t have an answer that I could formulate into specific words.  Mothering, at least my mothering, is so overwhelming and all-inclusive and constant, and I couldn’t isolate one individual thing of which I am proud above all else.  The question was too vast, too complicated.  Plus, then I read this beautiful post, and knew anything I could possibly put together would fall desperately short.  And so I chickened out.

But I didn’t stop thinking about Emily’s question.

And now, I may have an answer. 

Sunday was the first meeting of my mother-daughter book club, and It. Was. Fantastic.  Better than I could have ever imagined.  So far, we only have two mother-daughter “couples” (me, Eloise, my friend Jenny, and her girl Lola, who is conveniently Eloise’s best friend), but it was the perfect balance for a first meeting.  We discussed The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall.

So we each read the novel, printed out some discussion questions from the internet, and met at La Madeleine French Café for dinner.  It was a perfect venue – no one had to cook, and the girls could enjoy gigantic hot chocolates while Jen and I sipped glasses of wine (because what is a book club without wine, for goodness sake?  Not something I’m attending, to be sure).  We’re planning to meet once a month, each time at a different restaurant, so the girls can experience a new cuisine at each meeting – next month is sushi, for example, and we’re talking about meeting at the Houston MFA when we do From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.  Perfect, huh? 

But here’s why it was so great.  First of all, Jen and I each have three kids, so it was amazing to have the opportunity to spend focused time talking (like adults!) with our big girls, without distraction – no diapers, no one falling out of a chair, nobody throwing a tantrum, no one refusing to go to bed or needing a bath or a hug or some goldfish crackers or screen time or I can’t find my other shoe! or WHATEVER.  No interruptions.  And no interruptions for the girls either, because they got to take a night “off” from the demands of oldest sister-dom:  No annoying younger siblings, no strict bedtime, and any dessert they wanted!  Plus, it was surprisingly wonderful to see Jen connecting with my girl, while I interacted with hers.  I think it must be so validating for young ladies to really be paid attention by an adult who is not her parent.  And the talk was remarkably insightful!  There was no silliness, no nonsense.  Just little girls being celebrated for using their brains to analyze, to consider, to formulate thoughtful responses via the gathering of textual evidence (the scholar in me weeps!  Weeps with joy!).  What an empowering way to bond with a daughter, and I’m so glad we did it.  I’m so proud of them.

Next month is Matilda, and I can’t wait.  Who wants to join us?

Her Fearful Symmetry – Audrey Niffenegger

I despised this hateful little book.

I honestly don’t even feel like thinking about why I hated this novel so much, but my conscience dictates that I positively owe you the service of instructing you NOT TO READ THIS.  I really went against my better judgment in choosing it off the shelf; I guess it was just a literary dry spell or something.  Remember The Time Traveler’s Wife?  Which was fashioned into a deeply unsatisfying movie?  Well, this is the same author.

So here’s the deal:  It had potential.  It’s a ghost story, featuring twins.  There are lots of these – and great ones, for heaven’s sake!  Remember The Thirteenth Tale?  The Shining?  The Dark Half?  (Not to mention the obvious:  Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley Twins:  Super Chiller Series.)*  Plus, Her Fearful Symmetry is kind of a kickass title, don’t you think?  But the main problem with the story was that all the characters are utterly, well, loathsome.  And I’m serious:  All of them.  The twins are pathetic and spoiled and co-dependent to the point of ICK, the love interests are, um, creeping pedophiles, and the main character, who is a ghost, is just, well, a MURDERING ASSHOLE.  And the ending?  Well, all the worst characters get exactly what they want.  THE END!  Thanks for reading, and aren’t you glad you wasted three entire evenings on this?!?  (Especially when I still have like seventy-five fabulous B*G episodes in my instant queue?)  So.  That’s the scoop.  Don’t read it, and I’d suggest not reading anything else by Niffenegger either, because the book was just.  That.  Bad. 

Yet, in the interest of not ending this post on a sour note, I must make mention of a literary event I’m absolutely quaking over.  Tana French’s new novel, Broken Harbor, releases next week, and I’m considering checking into a motel for the evening to read it cover to cover.  If you haven’t read her yet, get on it immediately – In the Woods is one of the best crime/murder/mystery books you will ever encounter. 

Happy reading!

*By the way, here’s an interesting tangent:  Guess what’s being made into a screenplay?  Sweet Valley High, people.  And guess who is writing that screenplay?  Diablo Cody, that’s who!  (I might have just peed, a little.)  

We Need To Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with reading.  The reading of a book equaled complete absorption.  While between the pages, I wouldn’t hear anything around me (something that caused my parents endless frustration, since I constantly ignored them).  At night I couldn’t stop, so bedtimes were an enormous problem.  I would pretend to sleep, then open my eyes and read under the covers with a flashlight until I got too hot.  When my parents discovered this, I changed tactics.  I started sneaking to the bathroom after lights out.  I’d lock the door and sit in the bathtub with my novel until the wee hours.  In high school, I remember summer days in which I’d wake up, grab my book, and read in bed, still in my pajamas, until dinnertime. 

Today, I’m still obsessed, but I’m a grown-up about it.  Real responsibilities force me to be less reckless with my obsession, I suppose.  I contain my reading time to the stair stepper at the gym, and during kids’ naptimes, and in the evenings, after bedtime.  I usually manage to go to bed at a decent hour so that I can get up with my kids and face the day like a functional person. 

However, We Need To Talk About Kevin kept me up at night and I read the thing in about two feverish sittings.  I literally couldn’t stop.  It’s been a while since I felt this way about a book – I usually can bring some sort of mature detachment to reading, especially lately, what with the advent of the sewing mania (one obsession at a time, I guess).  We Need To Talk About Kevin is the story of a family – a happy couple has a baby.  The problem?  THAT BABY IS A SOCIOPATH, hell-bent on ruining the lives of everyone with whom he comes into contact.  Told in the form of letters from the mother to the father (the epistolary novel strikes again), it chronicles the family’s life and presents anecdotal evidence of Kevin’s psychological issues.  The book raises age-old yet still fascinating questions of nature versus nurture and most interesting (to me at least), Shriver’s narrative considers maternity in a unique way.  Eva, the mother, is not a sympathetic character.  She is not someone we want to identify with; her life is a horror.  Yet she is compelling because there are qualities in her that are hauntingly familiar to myself and, I’m sure, to many women – her episode with postpartum depression, for example – which make her all the more affecting.  Also, Eva is mother to a monster, and while she doesn’t love Kevin, she is intimately connected to him.  She understands him in ways that no one else does and knows his capabilities.  In her letters, Eva is unflinchingly honest about her son.  In this way I feel that We Need To Talk About Kevin redefines maternity in a feministic, non-essentialist, and therefore postmodern way:  Maternity without emotion.   Maternity is redefined as being about connection, not sentiment.

Anyway, you should read it, unless the topic is just too off-putting (which I totally understand).  Somehow, I seem to be reading lots of books about sociopathic behavior lately, which I’m certain can’t be healthy.  An aside:  We Need To Talk About Kevin has been recently made into a movie starring Tilda Swinton (who I LOVE) – and it is great, as well.  But read the book first, of course.

In other news, I got an iPhone.  It is a thing of beauty.

This is a huge development for me.  I’ve had the same flip-phone for like nine years.  Texting would take approximately fourteen hours, and I was basically a menace to society while driving because I had no mapping capabilities in my car.  (And absolutely no internal sense of direction, whatsoever, either.  Zero.)  So the iPhone is a serious game-changer.  Most notably, I’m getting prepped for a new television obsession, since I can stream Netflix on it any old time I want.  (Am in paroxysms of joy.)

Good hunting.

Some Suggestions for Summer

So lately, the pile of things-that-have-been-read-and-must-be-blogged-about is outweighing the pile of things-I-will-read-next, and it’s stressing me out a little.  I mean, as much as I enjoy telling you all what to read, lately I’ve been enjoying just reading even more.  So this is going to be a compilation post of several books I’ve read lately – we all need a bunch of good stuff to take to the pool, right?

The Lantern by Deborah Lawrenson

I love a good old-fashioned ghost story, and this book is indeed that.  Inspired by and reminiscent of du Maurier’s classic Rebecca, it is the creepy-crawly tale of a marriage falling apart, an ancient, crumbly estate, and the South of France – and it’s told via several points-of-view (a ghost being one of them).  The novel’s central trope is the idea of disappearing women – there is a serial killer on the loose, the ex-wife has vanished mysteriously, as has one of the previous owners of the estate.  (Incidentally, this character is blind, which fits in tidily with the general idea of disappearance.)  One notable aspect of Lawrenson’s writing was its pure sensuality – the descriptions of the Provencal winds, for example, or of fragrances (one character is a celebrated perfume creator), or of music (another is a composer).  All of these provided a more physical experience for the reader.   But I must say that my favorite thing about The Lantern was the fact that it told several mysteries simultaneously, some even bridging the gap of a particular time period.  I do love a mystery.

These Is My Words by Nancy E. Turner

When my book club picked this novel, I was not excited.  I really didn’t want to read about early settlers in Arizona; the “Wild West” isn’t something that holds any real interest for me, though I do enjoy historical fiction as a genre, overall.  But then I started reading, and the book is great.  Kind of like Laura Ingalls Wilder, but racy.  (It is a love story, in case that makes a difference to you one way or another.)  These Is My Words is an epistolary novel, a form I adore, written in the style of journal entries by one Sarah Prine.  Sarah, the “author,” is a wonderful female character – tough, smart, and good with a rifle – and this installment of her story (it is the first of a series) covers her young womanhood and early adult life.  (It appears that the real Sarah Prine was Turner’s great-grandmother, and the novel was inspired by her actual life.)  All in all, it is a quick read, and much enjoyed.  I’m looking forward to the other books in the series.

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

Another book club selection I was not initially excited about.  You might remember Hillenbrand – she wrote Seabiscuit?  (Which I’m sure is wonderful, because that’s what everyone in the world says, but I just can’t do horse books.  Sorry.)  So Unbroken is her new book, and IT IS AMAZING.  Amazing.  Here’s the story, in a nutshell:  Dude is a juvenile delinquent in California, turns life around by becoming effing fast runner.  Dude goes to the 1940 Olympics in Berlin, where he briefly meets Hitler.  Dude joins the AAF and is shipped out to the Pacific Theater during WW2, to drop bombs on Japanese-held islands.  Dude’s plane crashes in the middle of the Pacific, yet he survives.  Dude ends up on raft for something like forty-six days with no provisions, yet he survives.  Dude washes up on Japanese soil and becomes a POW and is systematically tortured over a period of years, yet he survives.  (And those are just the highlights.)  Anyway, it is the best description I’ve ever read of what things were like for the airmen of that time (those planes were totally unsafe, you guys.  Crazy death-traps; airmen during that time had a one in two mortality rate).  Hillenbrand’s research is impeccable, and her writing style flawless; she has a knack for including compelling personal anecdotes to invigorate the narrative.  My favorite of these concerned the airmen’s life vests that were included on planes in the case of a crash.  Many times the life vests failed to inflate, not because they were defective, but because the soldiers had stolen the compressors to carbonate their drinks back at the base.  Incredible.  Hillenbrand provides a million such details, which makes for a completely consuming book.

That’s all for now.  This should get us almost up-to-date.  Chime in with your thoughts, and happy reading! 

The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen

And, just like that, I’m back.

Back from where, you may ask?  (Or you may not, but I’m going to tell you anyway.)  First, we did this:

And then this:

And next this:

And even this:

And later this:

And finally, this:

And throughout, a whole lot of this:

But now, we’re back home.  Exhausted, and realizing that our next family trip must include some rocketing to the moon upon which a circus featuring Elvis is performing in our honor in order to compete with the sheer fabulousness of this trip, but home.  Furthermore, I’ve been reading some great books this summer, and have started about 700 blog posts in my head but haven’t yet been able to string together more than ten consecutive minutes at the computer.  Until now.  Summer, why so frantic?  Why?  Alas.  Here we go.

I finally read The Corrections.  In case you’ve forgotten, or simply blocked it out, Jonathan Franzen’s magnum opus was chosen as an Oprah selection in 2001 (not to mention that the book earned him a National Book Award and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer – because let’s be honest, what does any of that really matter when it’s Oprah we’re talking about?).  Anyway, amazingly, Franzen declined the obligatory dinner with Oprah.  CAN YOU IMAGINE???  The mind, it boggles.  Obviously, that made me want to read Franzen’s book even more, but for some reason I never quite got around to it.  (At almost 600 pages, it is a commitment book, just so you’re aware.)  Then, you know, I was having all. these. kids. and couldn’t hold a coherent thought in my head for about five years.  Plus Franzen went off the radar until just recently, when he published Freedom.  (The dude doesn’t publish often – his books are long.)  So I finally took The Corrections with me on vacation, and you guys, it’s great, as long as you like family sagas that feature TOTAL AND COMPLETE DYSFUNCTION.  Which I do, most certainly.

What I loved most about it were Franzen’s succinct and scathing descriptions.  Like poetry, each word is economized for maximum effect, nothing wasted, nothing extraneous.  (Hard to believe, in a gigantic book like this one.)  For example, on unappreciated gifts:

A few hours after [Enid’s gift to Caroline,] the mutilated Austrian reindeer had come to light [by turning] up in a trash can like a murdered baby.

(That final simile is just so wrong it’s right, no?)

On ill-advised home-décor:

The living room was half a block long and furnished with gilt chairs in sociability-killing formations.

On foreign travel:

I saw an old man kill a horse with a shotgun on a street near the airport.  I’d been on Baltic soil for maybe fifteen minutes.  Welcome to Lithuania!

On guilt and owing a debt:

He’d lived with the affliction of this debt until it had assumed the character of a neuroblastoma so intricately implicated in his cerebral architecture that he doubted he could survive its removal.

And finally, on dinner, possibly the most horrifying description of food ever encountered, by anyone:

A dollop of mashed rutabaga at rest on a plate expressed a clear yellowish liquid similar to plasma or the matter in a blister.  Boiled beet greens leaked something cupric, greenish.  Capillary action and the thirsty crust of flour drew both liquids under the liver.  When the liver was lifted, a faint suction could be heard.  The sodden lower crust was unspeakable.

Actually, the entire “Dinner of Revenge” scene is perfection:  Hilarious, and, to me, the most memorable portion of the book.  I would bet that Franzen had the most fun writing that section – his exuberant descriptions were so absolutely over the top that they struck me as utterly joyful.

Plus, now that I’ve finally read the book, I am even more delighted with the irony that Oprah picked it at all – did she really miss the fact that the novel is a scathing indictment on American consumer culture – a culture of which she is arguably the reigning queen and chief instigator?  (Or, at least, she was in 2001.)  Did The Corrections make it onto her “Favorite Things” list as well?  Oprah, you baffle me.

Enjoy!

Various and Sundry

Hello out there!  It’s been a while.

For those of us with children, especially school-aged children, May is always crazy.  Between homework and piano recitals and t-ball games and music programs and awards ceremonies and girl scout bridging and grandparent visits and organizing the teacher gift and harvesting tomatoes  and packing for vacation and pool season beginning here in south Texas and so on and so forth…it is almost impossible to come up for air.  Thus, the blog has been neglected.  I’ve been missing it, actually, but really can’t say what the summer will bring in terms of fulfilling my goal of a once-per-week post, since I’ll be on full-time mom duty again. (The summer holidays – looking forward to them with equal parts excitement and dread). 

However, I have been reading some GREAT STUFF.  Today, let’s talk books for the wee ones.  The Who Was series is amazing. 

Eloise and Owen (ages seven and almost six, respectively) each received three of these in their Easter baskets this year and devoured them in a matter of hours.  They are an excellent introduction to biographical chapter books, and are wonderfully cross-cultural as well.  (Yes, so the cover art is a bit creepy with the gigantor-head.  Avert your eyes!)  I bought them in an attempt to expand the kids’ interests in various genres (since I tend to lean heavy on the fiction when left to my own devices), and I’m happy to say that both of them loved the series. 

Another book that has been sitting next to my computer for weeks now is this one.

Again, another fantastic introduction to biography (coincidentally, the author is a contributor to the Who Was series, but this one is color-illustrated and therefore perhaps for the slightly younger child).  I read this one to Eloise and Owen and was particularly impressed by the amount of discussion it triggered.  In other words, plan on this relatively short tome taking upwards of an hour in aloud-reading time, because you’ll need Google to answer all the questions it sparks.  Discussion topics covered were as varied as feminism and the women’s rights movement, slavery and abolition, existentialism (try explaining that in twenty words or less to a couple of kids who don’t even tie their own shoes), vegetarianism, vaccination, the Civil War (also a tricky explanation for the little dudes, seeing as how we’re Southern), and mercury poisoning.  Keep your smartphone handy.

But here’s what I’m super excited about today, which we found at the library just this morning.  Have you read Alexander McCall Smith?  He of Precious Ramotswe and The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency?  Well, if you haven’t, get on it posthaste and tout de suite. 

All of his books are wonderful wonderful wonderful:  Lovely, good people doing honorable, just things.  They will restore your faith in humanity.  Plus, I believe that McCall Smith is one of the absolute best modern writers at “turning a phrase,” if you will.  The way he puts words on paper is so clever, so precise, and so utterly charming and funny – he is extremely talented, and his novels simply a pleasure.  (An aside:  The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series was made into a HBO show for one season.  It was delightful, but unfortunately cancelled.)  Anyway, now he is writing children’s literature and I am beside myself. 

It’s Precious Ramotswe, as a child!  SOLVING MYSTERIES, people.  (Mysteries involving cake, it appears.  Even better.)  Love.

In other news, I’ve been watching Downton Abbey.

I’ve discussed my detrimental television habits in the past here, so by the words “I’ve been watching” you understand that I mean “I’m completely OBSESSED with, and not in a psychologically healthy way.”  (Why do they need dinner, AGAIN?  Can’t Eloise just put some waffles in the toaster?  God, can’t they see that we’re in the throes of the 1918 Spanish Flu, here?)  I also realize that I’m possibly the last person on earth to board this particular bandwagon.  I KNOW.  Next I’m going to really step into the vanguard by, I don’t know, getting a cellular phone, or something.  There is no stopping me.

The Weird Sisters – Eleanor Brown

I loved this novel.  I guess one would classify it as “chick lit” (if one were particularly condescending) in that it centers on a trio of sisters as they return home to care for their ailing mother.  But it is smart, and funny, and warm, and while it isn’t the most earth-shattering tome you’ve ever beheld, it is just a Good Book.  I’m so glad I read this book now.  Lately I’ve been reading some mindless drivel (thank God that’s over, (uh…kind of)), and some terribly boring stuff (The Tiger’s Wife, Oprah?  Are you high?), and a bunch of stuff to my kids (the Who Was? series in particular, more on that later), and it was nice to be simply entertained by a book.  Put The Weird Sisters on your summer reading list; it’s the perfect “beach” read – not too heavy, but well-thought-out and completely absorbing.

The Weird Sisters was particularly poignant to me because lately I’ve been thinking about women, and sisters, a lot.  I don’t have sisters.  I have a lovely step-sister (who is rather recent; we didn’t grow up together) and several wonderful sisters-in-law, but no actual blood-related, room-and-hand-me-down-clothes-sharing, fighting-over-the-hairbrush-and-princess-phone sisters.*  My family and Mike’s family both run heavy on the Y chromosome.  So the sister relationship is sort of fascinating to me – like, in an anthropological sense.  And though I’m not a sister, I am wholeheartedly a “girl’s girl.”  I have lots of close girlfriends.  I have never been that girl who has “more guy friends than girl friends” or who feels more comfortable hanging out with the boys.  (In fact, men rather intimidate me.)  But the sister relationship is different.  I watch sisters interacting like a kind of voyeur, so reading a novel about them is always fun.    

My friend Kristina, the oldest of three sisters and two step-sisters, once described the sister relationship as follows:  “We can be having a huge screaming fight, and stomp off to opposite sides of the house, but then five minutes later ask the other, ‘Hey – you wanna go to the movies?’”  This completely mystifies me – the fight as well as the forgetting of it.  When you grow up with brothers, fights are just different.  Less emotional, maybe.  Less fraught.  Definitely less often, I think.  Something like that.  AND we wouldn’t want to see the same movies, anyway, so that whole episode could never even remotely happen.  Instead we’d just yell and then totally ignore each other, never bothering to apologize or make up, but instead just waiting for the storm to blow past.  Possibly because I didn’t want to borrow their shoes.

But I have a theory about female friendship, so tell me what you think.  I have noticed that many women who have sisters become childhood best friends with other women with sisters.  On the flip of that, sisterless (or sisterfree?  Is that glass half-full or half-empty?) women become childhood best friends with other sisterless women.  Of the women I’ve informally polled about this over glasses of wine, I’ve noticed this to be surprisingly widespread.  I don’t think this happens as much once women are older; I’m talking specifically about the close female friendships that begin in childhood and last throughout a woman’s life.  Have you noticed this?  If so, what do you think the reason for it is?  Do you think that it is possible that sister’ed women have slightly different needs than sister-less women in their early, close female friendships?  Like, those of us without sisters are always on the prowl for maid-of-honor potential, since our genetic pool didn’t handily provide us one?

In a different vein, another thing I appreciated about The Weird Sisters was its presentation of the act of reading as solace.  Regarding the processing of tragedy, the narrator remarks, “we’d do what we always did, the only thing we’d ever been dependably stellar at:  we’d read.”  For me, this resonates.  When in the throes of postpartum depression, I remember sitting at my breast pump, reading.  Because if I wasn’t reading, I was crying.  Or dialing hotlines.  (It was bad, y’all.)  I remember reading all the Emily Giffin books in about three days after Owen was born – and what a gift those were, not because they are especially ground-breaking, but because they provided escape.  Ten years ago, when my mother was dying, we kept a round-the-clock vigil, in which one of us (either my dad, one of my brothers, my aunt, my grandmother, any one of my mother’s best friends – she was a “girl’s girl” too – or myself) would sit next to her bed, just to be with her.  Just to be present.  And during my time watching over her, I read.  I probably read a novel a day, because it was the only way I could leave my thoughts and my grief and my problems and my misery behind.  Strikingly, it was my mother who taught me to be a reader, and I think she would’ve been happy that her gift could comfort me when she could not.  Anyway, reading – and fiction, particularly – has always been therapeutic for me.

So, that’s what I’ve been thinking about with this book.  I’d love to know your thoughts, lovely reader (whether you’ve read the book or not).

*Remember those phones?  I had a lavender one (fabulousness!).  (God, I’m OLD.)