A good place for serious readers

Posted on April 2, 2009 | 1 comment

Welcome to A Reader’s Place–a resource for readers of memoirs and narrative nonfiction–well, fiction, too.  In addition to blog posts (below) and reviews,  there’s a special section devoted to memoirs. Click on the Memoirs tab above or the links to the right and you’ll find Reading Lists, Award Lists, quotes, and other interesting information about the genre that keeps on giving. Please feel free to comment, make suggestions, or contact me about speaking.

Read On Life StoriesMy book, a readers’ guide to memoirs and autobiographies–Read On…Life Stories: Reading Lists for Every Taste—was published by Libraries Unlimited/ABC-CLIO in 2009. It seems like everyone is writing memoirs these days and we’re all reading and talking about them. Read On…Life Stories will help you find memoirs you’ll enjoy reading, thinking about, and discussing with friends.

To order the book from Amazon, click here.
Booklist magazine review

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Posted in Memoirs

The books we’ve read

Posted on September 6, 2017 | Leave a comment

I subscribe to LitHub, which offers–in the way we read now–daily snippets of literary news and links to full articles. I scan the snippets and usually click through to one or two articles of moderate interest, but sometimes there’s a real winner and I keep that issue in my inbox because it’s too good to relegate to the trash. One recent keeper is a piece by Penelope Lively, one of my favorite novelists, about the books in her personal library. People who interview writers, often ask about what books the writer has on her nightstand or what books or authors are favorites. I must confess, that for the most part I’ve lost interest in the answers. The books on my nightstand are often pretty strange–the results of reviews that caught my eye–and often get returned to the library skimmed or unread. A large group of books I’ve bought with enthusiasm live under the nightstand in a sort of low priority limbo. Recently someone asked for the title of my favorite book and I froze, thinking that the only way I could answer that was to compile a list of all the books to which I’ve given 5 stars on Goodreads. I figure I’m not unique and writers answering those questions are not providing insightful information.

Then there’s Penelope Lively. Her article appeared in Granta and she titled it “Books Do Furnish a Room,” a nod to the 10th volume in Anthony Powell’s classic series A Dance to the Music of Time. Lively writes not about what’s on her nightstand, but about the books she’s bought and read over the years and that still live on her bookshelves. In her “mildly book-infested home…the shelves say something about the person who has stocked them.” What we read, of course, furnishes not just our rooms, but our minds. She writes about how the nonfiction shelves reflect her interest in Egypt, where she spent her childhood; English history and archaeology; and science among other subjects. Although her novels are set in contemporary times and plumb the depths of human relationships, they are literally and metaphorically informed by her wide-ranging reading in those areas.

My library doesn’t contain as many books as Lively’s. As a librarian I learned to weed vigorously. I do still have most of a shelf of Greek and Roman literature from college that I can’t part with as well as Pauline Kael’s complete reviews, but I tend to think of my local library as a convenient extension to my collection. And I do have a hand-written list of all the books I’ve read, going back to somewhere around ninth grade. That’s something I treasure as much as the books themselves. Here’s the link the Lively’s Granta article, worth reading for her lovely, graceful style. https://granta.com/books-do-furnish-a-room/

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Posted in Books and reading, England, Women's Lives

A dreadful week

Posted on November 10, 2016 | Leave a comment

ecstantonI received an email on Wednesday from a friend in Australia, very upset about the results of our election, can’t understand how it could have happened and aware of the global implications. My husband and I have been traveling, for the past two weeks, in Canada and upstate New York. Here’s what I wrote to her:

…I will tell you about our experiences today in a little town called Seneca Falls, in upstate New York. We timed our drive back home to spend 2 days here; it’s the birthplace of the women’s suffrage movement and we were hoping to celebrate at the national park that commemorates the 1848 meeting where a group of women drew up a Declaration of Sentiments based on the Declaration of Independence and began the hard work of convincing men and women that women needed to vote, which didn’t happen nationally until 1917. Seneca Falls is kind of a hallowed place in US women’s history. Well, it wasn’t going to be that kind of day. I almost expected the flags in town to be at half mast! Every woman I met here looked at me and said, How are you feeling today? and we commiserated. I met a woman with 2 toddlers in tow who said it just felt like the right thing to do today to get in the car and drive here. At the Women’s Rights National Park there were wonderful exhibits about the truly revolutionary women who started the movement.

At one point, I turned around and there was one of the great names, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, all dressed up in one of those voluminous black dresses they wore and she smiled at me. I walked over and began to talk to her (a park employee dressed up as Stanton), and she took us next door to the chapel where that first convention was held and, never breaking character, talked to us about the women and the convention, told us stories about Stanton’s family, and answered our many questions. We kept her there, just the two of us, for about an hour. It was so wonderful, especially since I’ve been reading and writing about the suffrage movement right now for the book I’m editing. It reminded me of the teaching in one of the Jewish texts: “you are not obligated to complete the work but neither are you free to desist.”

So there you are. Hillary didn’t complete the work, but she certainly didn’t desist from trying to move us forward a tiny bit. We’ve suffered through several dreadful presidents in the last 40 years–Reagan and the 2 Bushes (Bill Clinton wasn’t so great either) and we are still reeling from what they did, especially Reagan and Bush 2. There’s so much misogyny in this country that I don’t believe we’ll have a woman president in my lifetime and actually, I didn’t think Hillary was electable until she faced such a dreadful opponent. We just had 8 years of a great president who could only accomplish a fraction of what he wanted to because Congress is so racist and dysfunctional. So now we’re going from the great intellectual to the great dunce. Madness lies ahead.

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Books I enjoyed this year

Posted on December 26, 2015 | Leave a comment

Everyone else has picked their top books, but since I read up until December 31st I don’t like to make my list too early. As before, these are the books I read and enjoyed this year regardless of publication date. Fiction first, then nonfiction, not in rank order.

FICTION

Urza, Gabriel. All That Followed. Holt,  2015. 
An engrossing political novel, set in Spain, told from multiple points of view.  Did you read The Catastrophist by Ronan Bennett? Another great political novel.

Gornick, Lisa. Louisa Meets Bear: Linked Stories. Sarah Crichton Books, 2015.
A college romance echoes through the lives of Louisa and Bear, their families, and friends. Poignant and insightful. I love linked stories–previous favorites: In Case We’re Separated by Alice Mattison, A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert. (No need to mention Olive Kitteredge.)

Clark, Claire. We That Are Left. Houghton Mifflin. 2015.
An absorbing story set in England before and during WWI about the devastation wreaked by the war on a wealthy family. Great character development. Did you enjoy the TV mini-series The Cazalets? This is for you. For fans of Downton Abbey too, but not as soapy.

Marra, Anthony. The Tsar of Love and Techno. Hogarth. 2015.
Marra is an astounding writer–A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is one of those books that I want to read again for the first time. This new one is linked stories set in Chechnya; sad, violent, haunting, and totally human.

Schwartz, Lynne Sharon. Leaving Brooklyn. Houghton Mifflin. 1989.
Not sure how I missed this, since I’ve read and enjoyed many of Schwartz’s novels. It’s a brilliant coming of age story, with lots of 1950s New York atmosphere and piercing insight into a teenage girl’s thoughts. Read this with Schwartz’s memoir Ruined by Reading. Two gems.

Foulds, Adam. In the Wolf’s Mouth. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015.
A political/war novel set in Italy during WWII. An American infantryman and a British field security officer try to deal with the politics (and Mafia) of an Italian village. They haven’t got a clue. Beautifully written, a classic war novel.

Price, Richard. The Whites. Holt. 2015.
A good police procedural is so entertaining, and this is a great one. “Whites” refers to the unsolved cases that haunt a group of police detectives who work the Manhattan Night Watch. You may not remember the plot after a month, but you’ll have a great time while you’re reading it.

Evans, Lissa. Crooked Heart. HarperCollins. 2015.
Noel Bostock is a great creation–an orphan who’s wise beyond his years but still very much a child. Evacuated from London in WWII, Noel ends up living with Vera, who just wants Noel as an accomplice in her con games, but she gets more than she bargained for. Delightful and memorable.

Pierpont, Julia. Among the Ten Thousand Things. Random. 2015.
An adulterous relationship has serious consequences in this novel that’s so beautifully written it’s hard to remember it’s a debut by someone under 30. I can only compare it to Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, another tour de force about how people mess up their lives. Waiting for her next novel…

Hallberg, Garth Risk. City on Fire. Knopf. 2015.
Well, I read the whole 900+ pages and enjoyed every minute of it, but I’m not sure that it’s more than the sum of its parts when all is said and done. There are some great set pieces and Hallberg has done a great job of recreating NY in 1977, a terrible time.

Taseer, Aatish. The Way Things Were. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015.
This is probably, no absolutely, the best novel set in India that I’ve read in a long, long time, maybe since A Suitable Boy. It’s a very literary piece, about the role of language and history in shaping personal relationships. It’s not for everyone, but if it’s for you, you’ll be blissful. Maybe J.M. Coetzee is a readalike?

Weisman, Jonathan. No. 4 Imperial Lane. Twelve/Hachette. 2015. 
Another political novel that I loved this year, about David, an American student, who extends his year abroad in England by taking a job caring for the aging, paralyzed Hans Bromwell, who lives with his sister and her daughter. The politics comes from the family’s entanglement with Portuguese colonial Africa in the era of rebellion and independence. A life-changing experience for David and maybe for the reader, too.

…and I’m currently reading (and enjoying) Henry Green’s novel Loving, first published in England in 1945. Green’s a great prose stylist, works the language in wonderful ways. Years ago I read his memoir, Pack My Bag, always meant to read the novels…

NONFICTION

Shapiro, James. The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. Simon & Schuster. 2015.
What was going on in Shakespeare’s world in the year he wrote King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra? Shapiro elucidates the political, social, and religious concerns that influenced his plots and characters.

Russakoff, Dale. The Prize: the High-Stakes, Big-Money Race to Save Our Failing Schools. Houghton Mifflin. 2014.
This is the heartbreaking story of how billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t rescue the public schools in Newark; of good intentions gone bad; of politics as usual; of children deprived of a good education. If you read this, you’ll have to stop periodically to let the steam out of your ears.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. Spiegel & Grau. 2015.
Coates writes this as a letter to his son, about the issue of race in the U.S., for African-American young men in particular. Powerful, sad, and important.

Kim, Suki. Without You There is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite. Crown. 2014.
Kim spent 6 months teaching English to bright young North Korean teens, astonished at their isolation from the outside world and their acquiescence in the system that perpetuates their ignorance. Riveting stuff.

Lightman, Alan. Screening Room: Family Pictures. Pantheon. 2015.
A lovely lyrical and impressionistic memoir of the author’s Memphis family from the 1930s to the 1960s. Lightman’s grandfather was a movie theater impresario, a larger-than-life figure whose influence is still strong, years after his death.

Sacks, Oliver. On the Move: A Life. Knopf. 2015.
I’ve read Sacks’s books for years but had no idea that he rode motorcycles, was a serious weight lifter, and a sometime drug addict. This is a very personal glimpse into his life, and worth every page. Humorous and touching, especially in light of his awareness of his imminent death.

Deen, Shulem. All Who Go Do Not Return. Graywolf, 2015.
Deen bares his soul in this memoir of his childhood and young adulthood in a strict Hasidic community and his growing realization that he had to leave. A fascinating insider’s look at an unusual way of life. Over the years I’ve read a number of memoirs on this subject; this is by far the best.

Macdonald, Helen. H is for Hawk. Grove/Atlantic. 2015.
When Macdonald’s father died, she was particularly bereft and decided to tame a goshawk, the wildest of the falcons, in an effort to tame her own grief. More than a bereavement memoir, this is nature writing at its best.

Fuller, Alexandra. Leaving Before the Rains Come. Penguin. 2015. 
I’ve read all of Fuller’s memoirs, starting with the hilarious and touching Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight; this latest one may be the best. It traces the rise and fall of her marriage to an American and the ways that her unorthodox childhood in Africa affect her relationship with her husband and her own efforts to find contentment.

Gornick, Vivian. Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life. Yale Univ. Pr., 2011.
Gornick applies her own brand of insight and investigation into the life and motives of Red Emma, the complex and contradictory anarchist.

Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate. Simon & Schuster. 2014.
Klein gives us the bad news: the global free market economy is killing our planet and international trade agreements now take precedence over national laws. Important reading, not for the gloom-and-doom, but for her ideas about how we can make changes.

O’Neill, Joseph. Blood-Dark Track: A Family History. Knopf/Doubleday. 2011.
O’Neill probes his Turkish and Irish ancestry, giving us not just the unusual, colorful personalities, but the social and political history that influenced–and upended–their lives. If you enjoyed Out of Egypt by Andre Aciman or She Left Me the Gun, by Emma Brockes, you’ll find this irresistible.

…and I’ve been listening to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. Simon & Schuster, 2013. What a great story Goodwin tells and there’s so much relevance for the issues we struggle with today in politics and journalism. Her writing keeps it all lively and engrossing and the reader, Edward Herrmann does a great job of varying his voice and emphasis to keep the sentences interesting.

 

 

 

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Posted in Uncategorized

Small Mercies by Eddie Joyce (Penguin)

Posted on June 17, 2015 | Leave a comment

Small MerciesI loved this family story, a first novel that’s full of life and characters that live beyond the page. It starts off slowly, building the reader’s relationship with the Amendola family, especially Gail, the Irish girl from Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge neighborhood, who married into an Italian Staten Island family and learned to live with the rules of the culture she adopted, for  better or worse.

The novel takes place over the course of one week, but with a generous use of flashbacks we learn all about the Amendolas, what they think and feel. Wife Gail and her retired firefighter husband Michael had 3 sons, but the youngest, Robert, also a firefighter, was killed on 9/11. It’s now 10 years later, but the family is still reeling from the loss as they prepare for the birthday celebration of their grandson Bobby, Jr., this small son of their own youngest son, who has never known his father.

I always hope that the first pages of a novel will  tell me something wonderful about what to expect in the way of the writing. Each chapter in Small Mercies is told from the point of view of a family member, and on the second page, in a chapter told from Gail’s perspective, I found the nugget that let me know that I was in the hands of a great storyteller. Gail’s on her way out: “A quick look in the mirror. Not for vanity, not anymore, but for its older sister: dignity.” Brilliant. Joyce has something to say and says it well.

The Amendolas are part of a close-knit culture of Italians and Irish in Staten Island; what one character calls “the servants’ quarters of the city.” They share the neighborhood rituals and enthusiasms: liquor and sports anchor this community. There is some chafing at expectations: oldest son Peter couldn’t wait to get out and as a teenager rode the ferry to Manhattan to remind himself of where he wanted to be. But even as a successful lawyer, with a WASP wife, he’s unable to shake the feeling he’ll never fit in. Middle son Franky never recovered from the death of his younger brother and turned to alcohol to anesthetize his grief. Bobby’s widow, Tina, still tied closely to the Amendolas, wonders if 10 years is long enough to be a single mother as she starts to date. Gail and Michael have their own issues to work out and there’s reference to the ways they pleased and disappointed their own parents.

Joyce brings us into the thoughts of these characters and some terrific minor folks as well. He clearly loves them all. I enjoyed the structure, which allows him to introduce depth and reveal backstory. Each chapter is told from the point of view of a single character, but these alternate with Gail’s chapters, always coming back to her experiences and point of view. As the reader moves through the novel, hearing each characters’ thoughts, the characters become more rounded, more alive, and the story becomes more emotional and revealing. It’s an example of how domestic fiction, in the hands of a good writer, can be completely absorbing.

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Posted in 2015 Fiction, Families-Fiction, Fiction

The Sunlit Night by Rebecca Dinerstein

Posted on June 13, 2015 | Leave a comment

The title refers to the setting of this novel in the northernmost part of Norway, in the summer, where two unlikely Americans meet at a Viking Museum. I need to back up to set the scene for this unusual, affecting story.

Francis, a young artist, has just broken up with her boyfriend, who tells her that painting is of no use to the world: “What you do doesn’t help anybody.” Other parts of Francis’s life are broken: her parents are divorcing and her younger sister Sarah is getting married to a man that her parents dislike. Everyone is unhappy. Francis has the opportunity for an internship in Lofoten, a group of islands 95 miles north of the Arctic circle and it seems like the right time to get away. She’ll be working on something called the Yellow Project.

Yasha, a young man of 17, lives with his father in Brighton Beach where they own a bakery. Their lives are broken, too. Yasha and his father Vassily immigrated from Russia 10 years ago, but Yasha’s mother never followed them and refuses to communicate with them. They both miss her terribly and after Yasha’s high school graduation they decide to return to Russia to find her. Vassily suffers a heart attack in Russia and Yasha, according to his father’s wishes, takes his body to–you guessed it–Lofoten, to bury him as he wished. In the time Yasha spends in Lofoten, he finds much more than he ever imagined–he grows up, for one thing.

The joy of reading this unusual novel is in Dinerstein’s writing, which is circular, elliptical, and utterly captivating. She manages to convey the way we think and converse–the serious and mundane things that crash about simultaneously in our heads; the emotions we can’t or won’t convey; and the feelings of loss and loneliness that we all share. The setting and supporting characters are delineated in a few quick strokes, but their voices are unique.

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Posted in Fiction

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Posted on June 13, 2015 | Leave a comment

Turner HouseThis is a terrific family story, combining compelling characters and social history.  Flournoy does a great job of creating fully rounded characters–even the siblings that appear only briefly are real people. I suspect (and hope) she has more stories about the Turners  that didn’t make it into the novel.

The Turner family has lived on Yarrow St. in Detroit for over 50 years. Francis and Viola raised 13 children there and witnessed the precipitous decline of the city’s East Side. Widowed and elderly, Viola is now in danger of losing the house, which is worth less than the mortgage payments. Her children and grandchildren have strong–and different–feelings about whether the house should be saved.

From the oldest–Cha-Cha–to the youngest–Lelah–everyone weighs in with an opinion or a plan, depending on what the house means to them. Cha-Cha feels responsible for making decisions and providing for his mother; he irritates his younger siblings with his need for control. Lelah, the youngest, is secretly living in the old house; she fears that her brothers and sisters will learn about her gambling addiction. Troy, a policeman, has a scheme to make money by selling the house illegally. Turner focuses on these and several other siblings but we get a terrific sense the family dynamics. With all these stories and family collisions, there’s also a subplot about a “haint” that appeared to Francis and now Cha-Cha. The meaning of the “haint” is unclear to Cha-Cha, and he worries that it’s providing a message that he needs to understand. Turner cleverly doesn’t let the “haint”  turns the novel into a ghost story, but uses it as a device to reveal some of the dark undercurrents in the family’s history.

Flournoy’s descriptions of the Turner family dynamics and the house that holds them together is filled with the family dynamics we all know; it’s a universal story of how we love and struggle with our parents and siblings.

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Posted in 2015 Fiction, Families-Fiction, Fiction

Wednesday at Book Expo 2015

Posted on May 28, 2015 | Leave a comment

This is one of my favorite events of the year–a chance to meet authors and hear about forthcoming books, even take some home. The best. Today was the opening day, a half day really, starting at 12:30 with Laura Miller of salon.com interviewing Jonathan Franzen. A big crowd as you can imagine. Franzen had just come back from a birdwatching trip in east Africa and acknowledged that he was having a hard time inserting himself back into talking about the book, Purity, due out Sept. 1. He was, I’m going to say it, more than just a little inarticulate. I took notes as best I could and some interesting tidbits are below.

He talked about how each novel gets harder to write, because the early novels mine the easily accessible material, the stuff that’s most present. With each novel, he digs deeper, ultimately into areas that are difficult to write about. He talked about process–how he starts with an outline but once he starts writing  he always realizes that the book as outlined will never work. In fact, he wrote the first chapter of Purity quickly, based on the outline and was stuck; he didn’t go back to it until a year later.

Miller asked questions about the relationship between plot and character and Franzen spent some time discussing the conundrum of getting the reader to turn the pages in a novel where character takes precedence over plot.

An interesting note: the German edition of the book can’t be called Purity–the word carries too much baggage there.

From that interview I went up to the exhibit floor and waited on line to get a signed poster from Maira Kalman from her new book Beloved Dog. I told her that I had seen the small collection she curated at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum this winter and how interesting it was. She asked if I remembered seeing Toscanini’s pants and she told me that they belonged to her. She loaned them to the museum for the exhibit. (She also has the suit jacket.) I’d love to know what else she’s collected over the years. Of course I told her how much I loved the New Yorker “stans” cover.

Late in the afternoon, laden down with advance copies of books and some nifty canvas bags, I made my way back home. I’ll be back to the Javits at 9 tomorrow.

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Posted in 2015 Fiction, Book Expo, Books and reading