November Reads

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Les Miserables  I’m on page 420/1232. Part of me (about 35%)  says Why, oh why have you not read this before? The greater part thinks it is splendid to have the exquisite joy of reading this for the first time while I’m in my fifties. A friend warned me about Waterloo; she got bogged down. But, you know, I really only know Waterloo by its name. To me it was exciting as reading Shaara on Gettysburg. This sentence describing the cavalry grabbed me for its onomatopoeia and the progression of 3-, 4-, and 5-syllable adverbs:

They rode steadily, menacingly, imperturbably, the thunder of their horses resounding in the intervals of musket and cannon-fire.

The Hobbit  I’m on Disc 3, listening to Rob Inglis’ superb reading of Tolkien’s classic. I laugh at my teenage self who didn’t care for the book after reading three pages. It was all so confusing: hobbits, Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf, seed cakes. I’m trying to wait until Curt is home so we can listen together. To have two such magnificent books going through my head is an embarrassment of riches.


Arrow of God I’ve read several excellent books on Africa, but they since they have all been from a colonial perspective, I read Chinua Achebe’s novel. It took me about 2/3 of the book to get into the story of a Nigerian village. An old priest struggles to keep the old culture in the midst of change.

He found it refreshing to be talking to a man who did not have the besetting sin of smugness, of taking himself too seriously. 103

 

The Invisible Child: On Reading and Writing Books for Children  I expected Katherine Paterson’s book to be a memoir. As in a narrative. Instead, it was a collection of speeches. Once I got over that disappointment, I found many quotes to copy into my journal. Paterson’s books make me uncomfortable; they aren’t nice happy books. Oh, but they are powerful: one made me hiccup-sob 15 minutes.

Books are not TV or, heaven help us, MTV or the Internet. I suppose it would be possible to write a book whose plot jumped around like a frog on pep pills, but that’s not what books are about. If that’s the kind of writing you want to do, I think you should be in a more hectic medium. Books are meant to be read slowly and digested. These days people don’t pray much or go to services of worship, they don’t commune with nature—why, they hardly go to a national park without a TV set, a laptop, and a cell phone. The book is almost the last refuge of reflection—the final outpost of wisdom. I want children to have the gifts that books can give, and I don’t believe they can get them from a book that attempts to imitate the frantic fragmentation of contemporary life. 55

 

Baby Island  I responded to Carol Ryrie Brink’s book here.

 

Trudel’s Siege A little know book by Louisa May Alcott. My review.

 

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other Back in the 80’s, our telephone used to ring often throughout the day and evening. When we got overwhelmed with calls, we used to joke that it was time to move so our phone would quiet down. Lately, we get one, perhaps two calls a day. (Keep in mind that we only have a land line. Would it be different with a cell phone?)  Does this example resonate with you? It is just one of the things I’ve reflected on since I’ve read Sherry Turkle’s book. I didn’t connect with the first half of the book, an exploration of the role of robots as companions for the elderly and caregivers for the young. 

In the second part of the book, Turkle examines our increasing connectivity with each other online, but how oddly we are more alone than ever. I was struck with Turkle’s use of the word tethered to describe the pull and grip that technology has on us. I highly recommend this second half.

My own study of the networked life has left me thinking about intimacy—about being with people in person, hearing their voices and seeing their faces, trying to know their hearts. And it has left me thinking about solitude—the kind that refreshes and restores. Loneliness is failed solitude. To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise, you will only know how to be lonely. 288

 

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Seven Bookish Questions

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After three bloggers I admire (Mental Multivitamin, Quiet Life, and Semicolon) have posted answers to this meme, I’m eager to join the game.

1. What book (a classic?) do you hate? Gulp. I hesitate to say, because so many, many, many of my friends loved it. But I did not love Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. It was too dark and I didn’t see the point. I read it to the end, but I just wanted it to be over. I really didn’t like Antigone either.

2. To what extent do you judge people by what they read?  Not as much as people assume I do. But I’ll be honest: I make judgments. When a friend recently told me she plans to read what I call 50 Shades of Grime, I inwardly grimaced. But if my friend apologizes because she only likes to read mysteries or light reading, I truly don’t think any differently about her and don’t need apologies. On the other hand, when I sat across the table from a man who told me that life is too short to read fiction—implying that fiction is unimportant—it was all I could do not to glower.

3. What television series would you recommend as the literariest?  Masterpiece Theater. My non-bookish husband grew to love Dickens, Trollope, Eliot and others through watching Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, Barsetshire Chronicles, and Daniel Deronda.

4. Describe your ideal home library.  Three walls of floor-to-(cathedral)-ceiling books, with the sliding ladder; a fireplace somewhere on one of the walls; a wall of windows to let in the light; overstuffed chairs; a foot rest; a yellow lab who doesn’t emit bad odors at my feet; a pot of tea on the table, a string quartet playing in the corner. I’ve been in this room once (sans dog and strings) at my friend’s house; I wanted to move in. I’m in the midst of a year-long bookshelf crisis, with stacks and boxes of books in our garage after we dissembled our book wall in the bedroom. But a trip to IKEA is on the docket and I hope to install floor-to-ceiling shelves in our living room soon.

5. Books or sex? One after the other, but I won’t say in what order.

6. How do you decide what to read next?  Sometimes I stand in front of a bookcase in my home and think, “There is enough great reading here to keep me occupied for two years.” And I earnestly make a plan. Then I go into a different room in the house and have the same conversation in front of a different bookcase. I vacillate between reading books in order to release them—to make space on the shelves—and reading the best, most glorious books, which I, of course, plan to keep. This spring I re-discovered inter-library loans and read a dozen books that have been on my wish list for years.  Movie release dates push me into certain books: I’m currently listening to Rob Inglis’ masterful reading of The Hobbit and reading Les Miserables.

7. How much do you talk about books in real life (outside of the blogging community)?  All the time. If I have read a great book, my joy is not complete until other people have read it and loved it like I do. People know if they talk to me they will hear, I read a book about that…  My favorite dinner table question is Tell me what you are reading, and going around the table to hear responses. That question doesn’t come out unless I’m confident it would not put people on the spot. It is a gift to have reading friends. It is a gift to have patient friends who act interested when I go on and on. I love being the resident reader to whom people go for a book recommendation.

Mental Multivitamin said it best:

In a perfect world, it is what I do all day long: Read.
Talk about what I’m reading, what others are reading.
Read about what I’m reading, what others are reading.
Write, often about reading.
Read some more.
Sleep.

What To Expect When You’re Grieving

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Dear friends recently lost their dad. I remember being surprised after my dad died at how bone tired I was. As one acquainted with grief, I offer this short primer, not as a scientific study, but as an anecdotal narrative of what I’ve experienced, what I’ve observed and what you may expect.

1. Exhaustion   
Emotional work is physically exhausting. You will wake up tired, your sleep patterns will be disrupted, a deep weariness settles in. Make allowances for being tired; avoid extra responsibilities if you can. Take a nap without apologizing for it.

2. Disorientation    
Your brain is overwhelmed with thoughts and feelings. It is hard to focus. You repeat yourself in conversations. You begin a sentence, but can’t finish it. Fog is everywhere. Your ability to think sequentially is diminished. Basic decisions—where to eat, what to do next—are challenging.

3. Absorption
When someone you love dies, you look for clues, for signs, for anything that can help you make sense of his/her life. Or make sense of his/her death. You examine the relationship you shared, reviewing communications, reminding yourself of what is true. The more contradictions there are, the more you ponder. We want to understand, but the understanding doesn’t always come.  

4. Apathy
You couldn’t care less.  You stop eating. Or you can’t stop eating. Personal hygiene slips. You are tempted to veg-out with TV, computer games, mindless occupations. Habits help. Brush your teeth, take a walk. 

5. Isolation
Grief is a lonely thing. After the outpouring of your friends’ comfort and compassion, life for them returns to normal. But your life is unalterably changed. Grief makes people uncomfortable, unsure of their response, so they may avoid you in an effort to protect themselves. You may be reluctant to articulate your grief to yourself, let alone to others. Living in community can propel you into social situations that insulate you from isolation. 

 

There is no getting around the fact that grief is painful. We don’t like pain, so we search for shortcuts that will make the pain go away. I’ve seen folks allot 4-7 days to grieve and then pack up their grief and put it into storage. But grief too quickly stowed will return, ringing the doorbell, insisting on being present. 

How long will this last? Ecclesiastes 3 gives a clue: To everything there is a season, a time to every purpose under heaven. (emphasis mine) Three months is a normal time to experience the deep initial wave of grief. The loss will be with you until the end of your days; you will never be “over it.”

And then there will be the realization that—for a moment—you had forgotten how sad you were. It feels like betrayal to experience a slice of joy.

Another time will come when you feel like you should be sad, but the emotion is just not there. Then you make a decision to either manufacture the sadness or to let that moment pass. There is a ditch on both sides of the road: the ditch of denying grief, pretending you are fine; and the ditch of gripping grief with clenched hands that won’t release it.  When the tears come, let them. But don’t force them.

The summer after my mom died, I remember a scene of social awkwardness and resulting tears at a summer camp. Some girl impatiently demanded to know why I was crying. I was too embarrassed to articulate my awkwardness, so I played my trump card: “Well, wouldn’t you cry if your mom had died?” It was patently dishonest, and my ten-year-old self recognized—and regretted—the manipulation the moment those words left my mouth.

Underneath all of these thoughts is my faith that God is sovereign, that He knows my tears, and that I can trust Him. He doesn’t erase the pain as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, but He does promise to comfort us. And that is enough.

Books for Brave Girls

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If children can keep their wits about them and are brave,
they can always help in some way, my dear.
We don’t have such dreadful wars now; but the
dear God knows we have troubles enough,
and need all our courage and faith to be patient
in times like these.

In Trudel’s Siege, a book written by Louisa May Alcott when she was sixteen (1848), sickness, poverty and hunger lay siege on Trudel’s family. Her father, a linen weaver, is too sick to work; her mother, a lacemaker, cannot work while she nurses her husband; the old Grootmoeder could only knit stockings to sell. Inspired by the story of the siege of Leiden, Trudel looks for ways she can get food for her family. She gives her precious kitty, Jan, to the baker’s family in exchange for bread, sausage and milk. She goes out looking for odd jobs she can do in exchange for food. 

I can hear modern objections to this story: Why isn’t this girl in school? No child should have the burden of providing for the family! Where were social services?

I actually find the self-reliance, tempered with faith in God’s provision, very refreshing. So it’s a twinge too earnest. Trudel struggles with her sacrifices…for one minute. Such selflessness is usually only found in books. But Trudel’s satisfaction—her compensation—comes as she sees her parents and grandmother’s hunger abated. Alcott improves with age: who can forget Jo March’s satisfaction/sorrow when she sells her hair?

 

Carol Ryrie Brink’s book Baby Island (1937) could be Robinson Crusoe: the Young Mommy Edition. I found the Foreword essential for a modern reader to get this book.

When I was a small girl, it was the fashion in our circle
to borrow the neighbors’ babies. I myself was never a
very accomplished nursemaid, although I had many happy
hours pushing the perambulator of a young cousin; but
some of my friends had a positive genius for taking care
of and amusing babies. They never thought of receiving
pay for this delightful pastime. Minding a baby was its own reward.

When the ocean liner is sinking, twelve year old Mary Wallace’s first thought is to save the babies she has made friends with. She wakes her sister Jean, ten, and they find the twin toddlers and three-month old baby unattended. After scooping them up and getting in a lifeboat, a father gives them another toddler to hold while he returns for his wife. Suddenly they are cast off and adrift on the ocean.  

Mary is certain they will reach a little island.

Why the public library at home is just full of books about
shipwrecked people who landed on tropical islands. And
did you ever see a book written by a person who was
drowned at sea? I never did.

Whenever Jean gives way to tears, Mary rallies the troops:

Remember who you are.
Remember you are a Wallace.
Sing ‘Scots, Wha Hae wi’ Wallace Bled!’
and you’ll be all right.

The supplies, especially the canned milk, in the lifeboat sustain them until they land on a island. They build a shelter, find more food, build a pram and a playpen, while the baby gets a tooth, the toddler learns to walk and the twins start talking. They learn very practical knowledge of tides, “more today than I ever learned in school.” Mr. Peterkin, an old curmudgeon, lives on the other side of the island with his goat and parrot. 

It’s a whimsical book. Diapers—the need for or the stink or the cleaning of—are never mentioned. And yet I find parts of it plausible. When I was twelve, another twelve-year-old and I ran a day care center for the counselors’ kids at a summer camp. I marvel now to think of the responsibility we had, but at the end of the week all was well. 

What I loved about this book was the way Mary Wallace thought of the needs of others and how that kept her occupied and how her occupation kept her form sniffling and whining. Carol Ryrie Brink writes that her grandmother is in every book. Caddie Woodlawn is based on her grandmother’s childhood, but the spunk and resourcefulness of Mary Wallace is another clear reflection.

It strikes me that in both titles the girls are fortified by stories from books.  We must never stop reading good stories to our kids.

 

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The Wonder

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Today is a thrilling day. Right up there with the first real snowfall, the first crocus to rise up from the earth, and the first ripe tomato fresh from the vine.

 

I miss homeschooling my boys more on this day than any other day. For 16 years we sat at our dining room table and tried to be productive. But it was hopeless. Because we all could not keep our eyes from the tree across the street. Days before we watched a single leaf float and swirl down, followed after a long interval by another floatie. 

Then, one morning after a hard frost, the tree disrobes in a frenzy.  And it has all the fascination of a peep show. We could not concentrate on Latin declensions. History didn’t matter. Algebra was out the window. And I didn’t care. I wanted my boys to have a sense of wonder at the glorious display in front of their faces. To see beauty and then shrug in boredom would wither our souls. So we stared.

 

 

Life offers a finite number of first snows, a limited number of days in your life when you can stare at the leaves falling. Look. See. Wonder. Give thanks.

October Reads

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Picadilly Jim  (1917)  P. G. Wodehouse’s descriptions delight: a comfortable stoutness, a face that had been “edited and re-edited” by a boxing career, affected imitation geniuses, the art of raising eyebrows, dazzled by the glamour of incivility. And my favorite from this book: 

…her mouth had the coldly forbidding look of the closed door of a subway express when you have just missed the train. It bade you keep your distance on pain of injury. 

I first met Ogden Ford, “a fourteen-year-old boy of a singularly unloveable type”, in The Little Nugget; the kidnappers are ready at the end of the book to pay the family to take this son of a millionaire back. In Picadilly Jim there is another scheme by family members to get him kidnapped again. The main character pretends to be someone else who is pretending to be himself. Five stars, pure joy.

 

Moby Dick  (1851)  I read my husband to sleep every night with Herman Melville’s classic, in preparation for seeing Jake Heggie’s opera, Moby Dick, in San Francisco. We have officially abandoned Moby as a read aloud together. I plan to continue reading about cetology, or study of whales, and the story of Ahab’s vengeance.   I keep thinking this is a re-read, but I can’t be sure. There are gems, but the pace is slow.

 

Kitchen Sonnets and Lyrics of Domesticity (1931)  Ethel Romig Fuller, poetry editor for The Oregonian and Oregon’s third poet laureate, writes poetry that glorifies the common things of life. She sees cleaning as creating beauty. Fuller sees poetry in hanging the wash on a clothesline, beauty in canning, tidied calm in ironing, and a happy heart in washing windows.  She glorifies the common stuff of life.  A Song of Home speaks of happy hearts and tallying every blessing.  While a few of the poems made my modern head wince, overall I was inspired to devour those dust bunnies in the corners and love the blessing of making a home beautiful.

Are petitions less fervent, if one only asks
As one works, for strength for finishing tasks?

 

Skylines (1952) Ethel Romig Fuller — The poet turns her eye to nature: the rivers, the mountains, the sea, the seasons of life in the Pacific Northwest. Infused with joy and sorrow, she writes of the surgery of grief, a fugutive beauty, of “binning” the summer. 

Sea

Sea is a great hunger pressed
To a full white mother breast,
Where it ravens till the tide
Of appetite is satisfied;
Where it slumbers till the shore
Aches with plenitude once more.

 

Spot the Book Title (2007) Simon Drew — A Collection of Cryptic Nonsense and Pointless Hidden Meanings. A fun puzzle book, so visual that it is hard to describe using only words. Here’s an example under “The Plays of Williams Shakespeare”:  comma + pot of tea + o + carousel + oars.   There is no page at the end of the book with answers. If you must have a puzzle solved, you send a check to Drew’s charity. He explains, “This is not a payment: it is a fine for giving up.” 

My Reading Life (2010) Pat Conroy — He reads, he writes, he journals, he talks, he listens. From the time I could talk I took an immense pleasure in running down words, shagging them like fly balls in some spacious field.  He honors the mother who hungered for art, for illumination, for some path to lead her to a shining way to call her own. She lit signal fires in the hills for her son to feel and follow. 

I think I like Pat Conroy because we share the same writing weaknesses: sentimental, often disastrously so; I was over-dramatic, showy with adjectives, safe with form, weak on verbs, over-reliant on adverbs. I love his love for words, but ache at the estrangement that still exists in his personal life. One side of me would love to read 200 pages a day like he does, but I would have to isolate myself from people—more than I already do— in order to achieve that goal. 

A Chain of Hands (1993, posthumously), Carol Ryrie Brink — Ironic, on the last day of Daylight Savings Time, with the gripes about the change, to read this phrase: day-by-day satisfaction of daylight and dark. This book only makes sense if you have read several other CRB titles first.

 

Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (2008) Maggie Jackson  The premise of this book is simple. The way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention — the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. Jackson writes about a culture of skimming, new ways to disconnect from others, attention splicing, the dangers of multitasking, detachment, untethering, outsourcing memory to gadgets. The structure of the book did not make sense to me, but I found much to ponder.

 

The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (2011)  David Mamet — Conversions fascinate me. “I used to think…” is my favorite dinner party prompt. Mamet, former voice of Liberals, becomes the voice of Conservatives. The chapters don’t appear to build on one another; it feels like reading a collection of essays. Mamet’s Judaism informs his perspective and sits under every page of the book. He is blunt, articulate, and controversial. And he quotes Anthony Trollope.

My interest in politics began when I noticed that I acted differently than I spoke, that I had seen ‘the government’ commit sixty years of fairly unrelieved and catastrophic error nationally and internationally, that I not only hated every wasted hard-earned cent I spent in taxes, but the trauma and misery they produced…

 

Murder Your Darlings

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I’m reading and thoroughly enjoying, in dribs and drabs, Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret … With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory. This section made me snort in laughter.

In his book On the Art of Writing (1916), Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, an eminent critic, anthologist, and adventure novelist, handed down a guideline for writers that people are still handing down. Usually people attribute it to Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Noël Coward, W.H. Auden, Oscar Wilde, or someone else whose fame has lasted longer than Sir Arthur’s. Here is that guideline in its original form: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press: Murder your darlings.”

[…] What generations have taken from his admonitions, though, is that we writers should root out our own self-indulgent bits, the vivid turns of phrase that call attention to themselves instead of advancing the narrative for…you. The reader. […]

Yes, well. Sir Arthur’s pen name was Q. Some frills trimmed there. But don’t you suspect that after rejecting Kill your pets as too mean and Eliminate your sweeties as ambiguous, and then hitting, bingo, upon Murder your darlings—don’t you suspect that he thought to himself, Q, you are cooking?

 

Satisfaction of Daylight and Dark

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She worked hard
and managed her life
with dignity and good humor.
What did she get out of it?
A step-by-step and day-by-day satisfaction of daylight and dark,
of turning seasons,
of gardens and flowers and friendly animals,
of sharp knives and clocks that were on time,
of well-baked bread
and a properly stuffed and roasted chicken,
of rich memories of a happy childhood.

 

Carol Ryrie Brink describes her Gram, who, she says “has crept into nearly every book that I have written. Sometimes she is the chief character, sometimes she has a minor part; sometimes she is young, sometimes she is old.” I have enjoyed getting to know Carol’s Gram, whom I first met in the delightful Wisconsin frontier book, Caddie Woodlawn. If you love Laura Ingalls Wilder, you will love Caddie Woodlawn. With a picture of Gram in my head, I’m eager to re-read the story of her childhood.   

The quote above comes from A Chain of Hands, Brink’s final book, published posthumously. This book is a series of vignettes about the hands that touched and transformed Carol Ryrie Brink’s life.

What strikes me about Gram, is that her granddaughter could write this about a woman who had experienced a truck-load of tragedy. Her husband had been murdered “just after he had let his insurance policy lapse.” She lost five children in their infancy. Her daughter (Carol Ryrie Brink’s mother) killed herself after a bad second marriage. She raised or partly raised three grandchildren. Yes, this is Caddie Woodlawn’s life!

…but it was impossible to live with her
and not be infected with some of
her honor
and justice
and good humor.

 

Jerky

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At the bottom of my email inbox—a dark and very deep well—I have two requests for jerky (or biltong, the South African version) recipes, in response to the September 2011 post, I’m Converting. I’ve delayed because no two batches of jerky are ever the same. My son, Carson, made a large bunch of jerky a decade ago that still evokes fond sighs. If only we had written down those proportions!

We make jerky from hamburger, using a jerky gun and a food dehydrator. It is easy to mix and easy to chew.  You can make it in the oven, in a smoker, even in the sun if you live in a very hot climate.  It sounds obscene to say, but we make jerky to use up leftover burger in our freezer.  You know, that hunting thing.

Substitutions are allowed. I would never use plain salt in a jerky recipe. My cupboards are brimming with smoked salt and various seasoned salts. The heat in the jerky can come from cayenne, red pepper flakes, hot sauce. Two years ago I had a banner crop of jalapenos, which I dried and ground into red pepper flakes, which I am still using.

You need a LARGE bowl for mixing the ingredients. Wash your hands and plunge them into the meat and spices. Squeeze, twist, turn, squeeze, until it is thoroughly mixed. This would be a “critical” step.

I grew up eating raw hamburger, only one of the bizarre items in my catalog of eccentricities. Hence, I have no problem taking a bite and adjusting the seasonings. If you are normal, you don’t want to do this. Plop a tablespoon in a fry pan and cook it; then you can taste the flavor and correct, if needed.

 

Recipe A – Hamburger Jerky

4 lbs. hamburger
2/3 cup brown sugar
4 T salt
1 t garlic powder
2 T black pepper
1/2 – 2 t cayenne
1 T onion powder

Mix and refrigerate for 24 hours.

If you don’t have a jerky gun, roll 3/16″ thick, place on racks. Smoke approximately 10 hours. Cut into strips. Store in refrigerator.

 

Recipe B – Hamburger Jerky

11 1/2 lbs. hamburger
2 T – 3 T liquid smoke
1 T  meat tenderizer
3 T onion powder
2 T lemon pepper
2 T seasoned salt
2 T garlic powder
4 1/2 T red pepper flakes
2 cups brown sugar
1 cup Yoshida’s sauce
1 T hot sauce

If you have questions, please ask. I might answer by Christmas 2013.