'Tis the last day of November,
And what do I do?
I struggle to publish
A book list for you......
Bad attempts at poetry not withstanding, I will get my October reading out of the way, if only so that I can start on the November list, hopefully before my December gets out of hand.
It may already be too late for that, of course. November seems to be simultaneously a time when I have mustered energy and strength enough to begin putting the routines of daily life back to rights while at the same time, shoving my shoulders to the door and bracing my feet to keep it from bursting wide open with the calls and demands of worldly too muchness.
But.......Books
My October reading was, for the most part, light and inconsequential, not that there is anything to complain of in that. I was in undergoing radiation therapy. I had days of increasing strength and energy, and days where I would have happily stayed in bed. I was frustrated that, although I was feeling increasingly better as chemo therapy drugs were dissipating from my systems and my body was beginning the long process of healing from the onslaught, neuropathy continued to be a problem. I wanted it all to be done. Very human that, as also is the impetus to escape into something silly and or distracting.
114. October started off with The Guest Book by Sarah Blake. Oh my, was this a frustrating read! In fact, had it not been for a book group, I would have abandoned this book fairly early on.
Surprisingly, although I struggled through the five-hundred some-odd pages of dissatisfied whining by wooden characters in a novel with no core, no heart, nothing to grab onto, there were parts of this novel, certain themes, that persistently stayed glued in my thoughts. Yes, I thought. Yes, I wondered. Yes, I wished that the author had been less scattered in her focus on big themes, and had more adept at tying them together in deeper development of at least one character. There is a lot that could have been explored here: A multi-generational family saga, an island in Maine, family secrets, so much to explore. But it wasn't really explored, just listed, and almost analyzed through the overlapping stories of three generations of women, except that this interleaving of experiences never quite worked, and this reader never really connected with any of the three women.
Blake was taking on big questions and alas, the questions overwhelmed the novel. Rather than deft emotional exploration we were given minutia, pat answers and cliché. This book left me yearning for a different book; it could have been so much more relevant, revealing, even rewarding had there been less attention paid to throwing in circumstances and greater focus on the personal repercussions caused by the ripple of those circumstances. I found the novel to be less than satisfying, even if thought provoking. No regrets however: it was worth reading the book if only for the group discussion, which was far more interesting than the novel itself. In that sense, I would have to say it was a good book club novel; depending on the temperament of the club itself.
Book 115: Charming Falls Apart by Angela Terry. This sweet, charming, bit of fluff, chick lit at its best, just made me happy. It didn't take long to read, and the story was predictable, but those were not problems here. The story, about a young woman who loses her job and her fiancé on one fateful day, and has to find her way back from this upset of her "perfect" life, is just fun to read. There is humor and growth, and yes a bit of sappiness as well, but it was the perfect book for me at the time. The gentle exploration of vulnerability and self-mockery exploited by self-help books was particularly adept. Sometimes one needs something that just brightens the spirits, and does it with a light hand.
116. I went into Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken with high hopes. I was disappointed although it is not necessarily a bad book. Perhaps it is just that the passage of time has not played well with Hawken's thesis. It is actually a very good survey of millions of small NGOs from around the world, of the desire of people to effect change, and a cataloging of the, mostly local, desire of humans to change direction and return to some kind of biological, environmental, and humane sanity. But he is trying to define this movement as a coherent movement, despite its incoherence. Hawken acknowledges the localness of the human condition, and even makes efforts to point out that the global human community and its impact does not depend on agreement on specifics, but acknowledgement of the common humanity that includes our differences. He fails in that he focuses too greatly on labeling a movement, even as he acknowledges that a defining focus cannot exist. I found the book naively optimistic.
A quote from the introduction stuck with me though, and it defines much of the tenor of this book, and hits home with me in my own views of life:
If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren't pessimistic, you don't have the correct data. If you meet the people in this unnamed movement and aren't optimistic, you haven't got a heart. (4.1.4)
117. Next, I picked up James Baldwin's slim but profound volume, The Fire Next Time.. Baldwin's passionate voice, the intelligence of his observations and his prose are still highly relevant even over half a century after this book was written. Baldwin writes about being black in America, about how black Americans see white Americans, and chillingly so, how whites do not see themselves. It is a book that is easily read in one sitting, and yet I kept coming back to it over the course of several days. Absorption took weeks. I saw Baldwin's insights in other books, other events in my life, changing my thoughts, still. I think this is a book everyone should read, a book that I wish I had read when I was 15, when I was reading the writings of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. I didn't know about James Baldwin at that time. In my own, admittedly naive in some ways, worldview, this and quite a few primary sources would be taught and read by all teenagers when they study American History. But that would require a world that took a different view of itself. Whereas the more pessimistic side of myself believes the only lesson history teaches us is that we don't learn the lessons of history.
I ended the month with more frivolity. I talked to my mom on October 31, and she mentioned a book she had found in the library at her assisted living facility, Safe and Sound by Fern Michaels. I was tired and overwhelmed, I needed an easy read, and I was able to download it from the local library system to my kindle right then and there. So I read it.
118. This is volume 29 in Michaels' Sisterhood series, but I didn't know that when I picked it up. It was still an entertaining read, quickly finished in just a couple of hours. I will say up front that I do not like most of Michaels' romance novels, but I enjoyed this, and I went on to a bit of a mini-binge into the beginning of November. The novel is meant to pull at the heart-strings: a lonely, abused, child in trouble, women who want to protect him, and inflict punishment on those who cause this charming boy harm. The Sisterhood is a series about female vigilantes. It is pure over-the-top female revenge fantasy where bright ambitious women take on the ills of the world. No one is killed, but that does not mean that punishment and retribution are not occasionally quite violent. Yes, I loved it. I can say that even as the punishment in this particular case made me squirm, although I also understood it.
We are complex and inconsistent, we humans, aren't we? No point in pretending otherwise.
