Tag Archives: bookreview

Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down

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My sister-in-law first introduced me to PG Tips, which for me is synonymous with British Tea.  PG Tips is first choice among some choice local friends.   So when Angie reviewed this book, it was a given that I’d read it. 

The cover of the book shows oodles of biscuits [cookies in America] and no tea!  Well then.  The bits about tea bookend the book about biscuits.  Because biscuit appraisal is in Nicey’s blood.  Unfortunately, I have no interest in biscuits.  But I read the book because Nicey is quite funny and the whole book was a lovely taste of England. 

In short, this was a pleasant read.  If you want to get a taste of Nicey and Wifey, check out their website. Or take a nibble of these quotes.

Anyway, a nice cuppa while sitting down is the cornerstone of British society,
possibly even more important to us than television or queuing up for things.

Indeed, tea without biscuits is a missed opportunity.

The first thing you notice about an All Butter biscuit is that it is not all butter.
If it were, it would indeed be butter, and therefore suitable for spreading on toast.

Oats have long been a valuable source of sustenance
for both mankind and the Scottish.

The wafer is one of the many varied techniques whereby the food industry
persuades us to buy and consume air.

Oh dear, oh dear.
It’s the biggest-selling biscuit on the planet
and it doesn’t even know it is a biscuit.
The Oreo is baked across the world by Nabisco,
the name being a contraction of
‘The National Biscuit Company’ of the USA.

Waiting to be Read

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The arrival of books here is a weekly occurrence.  Between Paperbackswap, Amazon and various smaller publishers, I have little Christmas moments throughout the year.  I find myself frequenting my local library much less often because my personal library is alluring enough.

But two books arrived which are special.  Special because they are intended to be ingested as a couple or family.  As winter approaches we start reading a chapter after a meal.  During the dark of the year, Curt and I enjoy reading aloud to each other before sleeping.   The unspoken (but not unbroken) rule is that nobody reads ahead. 

On the dock:

Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World   
From the blurb: 
In these sparkling chapters, Wilson gives an aesthetic examination of the ways in which humanity has tried to make sense of this overwhelming carnival ride of a world. He takes a whimsical, thought-provoking look at everything from the “magic” of quantum physics, to nature’s absurdities, to the problem of evil, evolution and hell. These frequently humorous, and uniquely beautiful portraits express reality unknown to many Christians-the reality of God’s story unfolding around and among us. As the author says, “Welcome to His poem. His play. His novel. His comedy. Let the pages flick your thumbs.”

This will not be the first N.D. Wilson book we’ve read aloud.  We greatly enjoyed his young adult books 100 Cupboards and Leepike Ridge.  There is not a hint of schmaltz with Wilson.  I’m expecting an unpredictable, thought provoking, delightful read.

 
  Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial may seem an unlikely choice for healthy people to read.  But I have a problem with the funeral “industry” that exists today.  When my friend told me that her family paid $2,000 to rent a coffin for her dad’s funeral (he was cremated after) I was fired up.   

The adage “You’ll be told when you need to know” doesn’t hold water here.  I want to bone up on our options before it is time to lay the body down.    The opening quotation before the preface is Genesis 3:19  In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

    

* We started in on Tilt-a-Whirl tonight.  The first chapter was highly excellent.  This is gonna be a ride!   Here’s a sampler sentence.  “There are various theories as to how and why this all happened [the universe], attempts at explaining the sheer number of creeping things in the world, the stars, the life cycle of frogs, the social behavior of fish, the meaning of love, life, and a really good hamburger.”

Isaac and his Devils

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Isaac Hooker is the firstborn son from a mismatched marriage of a bookish, pipe smoking, poetry loving man and a scrappy catty white-trash woman.  Isaac has a genius intellect housed in a fat, slovenly, near-sighted, deaf-in-one-ear body, a “village idiot” who looked like “he ought to be institutionalized at the state’s expense.” Not your garden variety protagonist. 

Isaac at fifteen was a sight at once comical and a little alarming.  Blond shag standing on end, mouth a crimson popsicle, fat knees popping through his dungarees, he looked like a baby swelled up to man size, a parade-day float–a rubescent child-giant whose bobbing head and gesticulating limbs expressed a kind of runny, overflowing, ludicrously hopeful joy, self-importance, a desperation both to dominate and to be loved. 

The first part of Isaac’s story has many paeans to the joys of reading, to an appetite for learning.

And this broad scattering of [literary] wealth, this hoarding of precious objects in remote places, is what has secured the preservation and transmission of learning.  The earliest extant scrolls of Isaiah and the Psalms survived because a small community of malcontents decided to leave Roman-occupied Jerusalem and live in caves i the desert.  Bishop Wulfstan lived in Yorkshire in the eleventh century and by sheer longevity and isolation is said single-handedly to have ensured that English prose outlived the Norman Conquest.  You can lament the homogenization of contemporary life, with every hamlet sprouting the same franchises, and local dialects and costume melting into a bland uniformity, but look closer and see the secret richness, the ineradicable quirks.  

Surely some of you can relate to the marking of time by your reading (for me the summer of 1986 is the Summer of Dostoyevsky):

He marked his calendar by his reading as his neighbors marked time by sickness and natural disaster; they knew the winter of ’68 as the year the McCormick’s house burned down and Frank Olszewski was killed in Vietnam.  Sam knew it as the season  he read The Charterhouse of Parma in a fit of such caught exultation he could hardly breathe.

I can just about guarantee that the prose in Isaac and His Devils is three notches above whatever you are reading right now.  Eberstadt’s sentences are well-crafted, a joy to read.  I am smitten when an author can express something I’ve felt but have never articulated.  A sense of recognition and delight in having words to describe that circumstance or feeling.  Not only does Eberstadt write well, she writes with the knowledge base of a classicist.  [addendum: Eberstadt’s grandfather is Ogden Nash; at 16 she worked in Andy Warhol’s factory; she studied at Oxford.]

But the storyline took a turn – a liaison between a teacher and a student – that turned me off. And what I consider a potentially great novel petered out.

Why did I read this?  George Grant, one of my favorite book reviewers, caught my attention with these words:

Fernanda Eberstadt, in her brilliant coming-of-age novel, Isaac and His Devils, captured this sentiment: “Humility has a dank and shameful smell to the worldly, the scent of failure, lowliness, and obscurity.”

I have never come across another reference to this author or this book.  I’m willing to read more by her.  I’m satisfied to have the quotes written in my journal, but this is not a book I plan to keep or re-read. 

A Thread of Grace

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  There’s a saying in Hebrew, he tells her.

No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us,

there’s always a thread of grace.

Mary Doria Russell’s A Thread of Grace  is a dense book. 

When I read it half-heartedly-dipping in here and there–I just couldn’t muster any enthusiasm.  There are many characters and more storylines than a modern novel usually has.  The place names are unfamiliar (many are fictional) and it is easy to become lost, dislocated.  Like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, it takes a while to settle in and get comfortable. 

His face twists, but he holds back the tears,

determined not to commit the sin of despair.

After I finished this story of the Jewish resistance in Italy, sniffling and throat-lumping, I count it in the top five books about civilian life during WWII.  Russell (who grew up in my hometown, Lombard, IL) obviously knows both Jewish and Catholic culture deep down at the roots in this well-researched and well-written story. 

She nods and his glorious gap-toothed grin apears,

utterly transforming the homely face. 

To make a man so happy! she thinks. 

To make this man so beautiful..”Yes.” she says, “Really.”  

The courtship of Claudette and Santino, written with sparse, elegant prose, remains long after the book is finished.  Santino, a solid man, builds stone walls that will be standing 200 years after he’s gone.  Claudia (she Italicizes  her name) is a young refugee who is forced to grow up in a short space of time.  Like any book with Nazis and Jews, there is difficult-to-digest terror and violence.   

The old words come back, prayers he learned as a child. 

Misere mei Deus:

Have mercy on me, O God, according to the multitude of thy tender mercies.

The other relationship which barnacled my heart was between a Catholic priest, Osvaldo Tomitz, and Werner Schramm, a German Doktor who has deserted the Nazis.  The story begins with Don Tomitz hearing Schramm’s confession–who calculates that he has killed 91,867 people–and ends with Schramm acting as a priest to the father.  Don Tomitz wrestles with guilt, forgiveness, atonement and absolution as he ministers to broken people. 

May I share some of my favorite sentences?

~   Shutters open like windows in an Advent calendar.

~   Feeble as a good intention, he watches his own feet…

~   He could give a lecture on the natural history of terror.

~   He tries to thank God, but can’t help feeling like a thug’s wife who believe she is loved if a punch goes wide. 

~   Autumn light makes the varnished chesnut bookcases beneath the windows glow.  

 

Trollope’s Rachel Ray

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Beer and evangelicals: that’s what you’ll find in Anthony Trollope’s Rachel Ray. 

What Luke Rowan, the main man in this novel, cares about is brewing good beer. He inherits a portion of the brewery of Messrs. Bungall and Tappitt, gentlemen who consistently made muddy, disagreeable beer.  Naturally Mr. Tappitt objects to an upstart nephew suggesting ways to improve his beer.  To Tappitt, beer is business; Luke thinks there is a great deal of poetry in brewing beer.

He is “a young man, by no means of the bad sort, meaning to do well, with high hopes in life, one who had never wronged a woman, or been untrue to a friend, full of energy and hope and pride.  But he was conceited, prone to sarcasm, sometimes cynical, and perhaps sometimes affected.”  Perhaps the greatest compliment is that Luke “had the gift of making himself at home with people.”

In the character of Dorothea Prime, Rachel’s widowed sister, Trollope takes aim at pharisaic pietism.  “Her fault was this: that she had taught herself to believe that cheerfulness was a sin…”

Nice things aggravated her spirits and made her fretful.  She liked the tea to be stringy and bitter, she liked the bread to be stale; –as she preferred also that her weeds should be battered and old.  She was approaching that stage of discipline at which ashes become pleasant eating, and sackcloth is grateful to the skin.  The self-indulgences of the saints often exceed anything that is done by the sinners.

Sweet Rachel Ray is the antithesis of her sister.  “She walked as though the motion were pleasant to her, and easy,–as though the very act of walking were a pleasure.”  Rachel’s sister wants to keep her cloistered at home, leaving only for church services and afternoon teas at Miss Pucker’s house.  Rachel protests, “If I was minded to be bad, shutting me up would not keep me from it.”

Thus two views of marriage and courtship are at opposition.  Trollope poses “that great question,–What line of moral conduct might best befit a devout Christian?”

               
Marriage is the happiest condition for a young woman, and for a young man, too.  And how are young people to get married if they are not allowed to see each other?
versus

Men and women, according to her theory, were right to marry and have children; but she thought that such marriages should be contracted not only in a solemn spirit, but with a certain dinginess of solemnity, with a painstaking absence of mirth.

I loved the storyline but I adored the writing.  Phrases like “elated with dismal joy” and “she knew her mother must be appeased and her sister opposed” and “burial service over past unkindness” delighted me. 

If you are so inclined, click on the link in the first sentence of this post, then click Look Inside the Book, First Pages.  Read the first paragraph and tell me it’s not brilliant.

Rachel Ray.  Written in 1863; my favorite book of 2009.

Random Reading Notes

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Lots happening in the “Shire” and it. is. glorious.  Our community is celebrating weddings, music, friendship and growth.  I had not factored in how fatiguing glory can be, but surely there will be time to rest in the winter. 

One of my dear ones is getting married this Saturday.  Here is a Tolstoy quote that landed in her invitation:

The goal of our life should not be to find joy in marriage
but to bring more love and truth into the world.
We marry to assist each other in this task.
The most selfish and hateful life of all
is that to two beings who unite
in order to enjoy life.
The higher calling is that of the man
who has dedicated his life
to serving God and doing good
and who unites with a woman in order
to further that purpose.
~ Leo Tolstoy

The irony of that quote is that joy is the byproduct of a life of service. 

I have so many good books on my nightstand I can hardly bear going to sleep. 

You know, if you’ve read this blog for more than a week, how much I admire Wendell Berry.  I have two new book of essays and I love to read them wherever they fall open. 

Love is never abstract.
It does not adhere to the universe or the planet
or the nation or the institution or the profession,
but to the singular sparrows of the street,
the lilies of the field,
“the least of these my brethren.”
Love is not, by its own desire, heroic.
It is heroic only when compelled to be.
It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded.
~ from “Word and Flesh”

Another author in my top five favorites is Neil Postman.  The Disappearance of Childhood is teeter-tottering in my pile of books.  Some quotes such as “Reading is, in a phrase, an antisocial act.” need a bit more background to be appreciated.  My antipathy to television needs no bolstering, but you can’t blame me for chortling a bit over this Reginald Damerall quote on how television erodes the dividing point between childhood and adulthood:

“No child or adult becomes better at watching television
by doing more of it.
What skills are required are so elemental
that we have yet to hear of a television viewing disability.”

I’m revisiting a book that had a powerful impact on me thirteen years ago: Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman.  It is curious to re-read the book at a little more emotional distance.  I asked my husband to read the introduction and the first chapter in order to understand me better.  While he believes Wendell Berry is a better grief counselor, Curt appreciated this:

“How do I keep my mother’s death from being a lifelong lesson?
How do I keep it an isolated incident,
something so overarching, so devastating,
so pervasive in my life still?
How do I keep from being crippled by it?”
The answer, I believe–if there is such a thing
as a concise answer to such questions–
is to slowly learn to live with the loss and not under it,
to let it become a companion
rather than a guide.

Helene Hanff is kick-in-the-butt fun to read. 84, Charing Cross Road is high on my list of lifetime favorites.  She uses a strange and intriguing convention in Apple of My Eye, a book about New York City.  The entire book is a diary about a book she *plans* on writing.  Her friend  Patsy is forever commenting, “Put that in the book.”  Her humor is irrepressible, her writing wonderful.  She is one of those friends who is a walking encyclopedia, able to give you a two minute synopsis of the history of anything.  Thanks to Hanff, I’m am SO ready to visit the Big Apple.  The Cloisters, a collection of twelth and thirteenth century buildings, torn down and reconstructed in NYC, is now on my “must see” list.  I had never heard of it before this week.  Anybody been?

Then you look out,
and the splendor of the city
smites you all over again
with “astonishment of the heart,”
as it says in the Bible.

Finally, I am snuggling into Donald Hall’s memoir of his childhood summers with his grandparents in Maine, String Too Short to Be Saved.  I have to finish this so others (who are not yet aware that their earthly happiness depends upon reading this book) can begin.  When our kids were all together last weekend, we spent an evening reading sections of Aunt Doris’ memoirs aloud.  Whenever it sparked a memory, Grandpa filled in his own memories.  Stuff like his Grandpa who died in a field, sitting next to his tractor. My kids heard about the fine art of burning a page of the catalog and throwing it into the outhouse hole before you did your business so the seat was warm.  This book reminded me of that evening.

The idea of their [Donald’s grandparents] mortality
was never far from the surface of my day,
for a flush or a sigh or a hand pressed to the heart
brought death to me,
as if I had heard someone say the word.
It was a pack on my back,
and I would feel the sharp, physical pain
of their approach to dying,
something becoming nothing–or
was it my own approach to bereavement
that made my side ache?

What are you reading this summer?

The Book That Changed My Life

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George Grant first introduced me to the idea of reading what influenced your favorite author.  What shaped his views, her style…what has contributed to his voice?  So a book like The Book That Changed My Life is right up my alley.  Except I had not even *heard* of about half of the authors.  Wow. 

The interviews with David McCullough and Katherine Paterson are worth the price of the book.  Of course, McCullough understands the topic: he read what John Adams read while preparing to write about him.  And Diane Osen, editor and interviewer, has my admiration by one fact alone: she has read all of Trollope. 

And all those writers with whom I am unfamiliar?  Here’s some of their stuff: 

The very act of storytelling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of narrative is, by definition, holy…I’m very at home in the Biblical tradition that talks about the Word of God as the central manifestation of the way in which God is int he world.  This is what I take to be the essence of biblical faith…In other words, my notion of narrative informs my faith, and my notion of faith informs my idea of what writing is for.      ~ James Carroll

I think technology drains us of convictions.  It is so powerful and so sophisticated that we tend to lose some of our self-confidence in an almost imperceptible way.”    ~ Don DeLillo

Music can prepare one for writing prose that is very metrical and cadenced and musical; as a matter of fact, the terms that we use for prosody in English come from music.  One creative area, I think, cross-fertilizes another.   ~ Charles Johnson

David McCullough is a historian I greatly admire.  His books stick with me years after I’ve read them. 

I’m writing for people like me.  If I can convey how interesting the past really was, how full of life those people really were, what they were up against and how it turned out for them, then, my feeling is others will want to read what I’ve written.  And there’s no need every to trick things up, to sugar this or that, or use dramatic devices to make it interesting.  ~ David McCullough

I was very interested in the books that shaped him.  Here is a partial listing:

A Stillness at Appomattox, Bruce Catton
Reveille in Washington, Margaret Leech
Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner  
My Antonia, Willa Cather
A Night to Remember, Walter Lord

Katherine Paterson is a children’s author whose works move me.  I have sobbed, visibly and vocally, through some chapters of her books.  And I was *thrilled* to discover that some of my most favoritest books ever are also hers. 

I remember one woman just going at me, and she said, What did your father think of such a book [Gilly Hopkins]? knowing that my father was a very conservative Presbyterian.  And I said, Well, of all my books The Great Gilly Hopkins is his favorite, but then he’s read the story of the prodigal son.  Which was a mean thing for me to say, but he did understand what the story was about.  It’s very sad to me that many Christians don’t understand it.  They think that a Christian book is nice.  They don’t understand that Christians deal with life-and-death, hell-and-heaven issues.  And sin is a very important part of what we have to say.  ~ Katherine Paterson

I’m including all the books that have changed Katherine Paterson’s writing life.  You can be assured that the Desai and Endo books are now on my Wish Lists.

Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset
Clear Light of Day, Anita Desai
Silence, Shusaku Endo
Emma, Jane Austen
Poems, Gerard Manley Hopkins

Chords, Chords, Chords

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I am so ready to get serious about reading Willie and Dwike: An American Profile (reissued as Mitchell & Ruff: An American Profile in Jazz).  I’ve been flitting here and there, picking it up and reading wherever the book opens.  I’ve never been disappointed.  This book is chock full of treasure, with a capital T. 

My interest was peaked piqued   because William Zinsser, who wrote On Writing Well, wrote Willie And Dwike.  On Writing Well impressed me, but I wanted to read Zinsser’s work and see his style up close.  I had never heard of the jazz musicians Willie Ruff and Dwike Mitchell.

So I entered through the writing and I’m staying because of the music.  It. is. glorious.

Here’s what I read this morning, words that resonate, vibrate, relate, inculcate, and thoroughly delight me.  Because to paraphrase James Carville, “It’s the chords, stupid.”  Inevitably the chords grab me, hold me and squeeze me tight.  I think chords are to music what words are to writing: the greater your ‘vocabulary’ the more you are able to express. 

Here are snippets from pages 126-127, stuff that makes me want to shout and sing!  All emphases are mine.

It’s not a question of learning the song; he already knows most of the great ones.  The challenge is to give the song a series of lives that it had never had before, without violating its identity, and he will labor for days over one that engages his ear and his mind.  

Each chorus that Mitchell plays has a different feeling, the difference being in the emotional nature of the chords.  The chords themselves are like nobody else’s–elegant, surprising and yet apt; the ear never rejects them as “wrong.”  Beyond that, the chords in each chorus are intimately related to each other in how they are voiced.  They form a line and tell a story; they aren’t just showy chords plunked into someone else’s song.  The composer (whoever it is) is never harmed.

It was to try to understand how the ear arrives at such destinations that I began taking lessons from Mitchell… I hear chords coming out of his piano that make me quiver.  No matter how many complex chords I already knew or have since learned, there is no end of new ones: chords that I never imagined and would never be able to find myself.

When he and I analyze chords we are like two lepidopterists poring over a tray of brilliant butterflies, delighting in their infinite variety and their subtle gradations of color.

Most of all, he talks about feeling.  He often mentions some pianist who was technically flawless but who “might as well have not played at all.”  Emotion, to him, is the crucial ingredient, and music is a total commitment.  In his conversation and his concerns I glimpse what it is to be an artist and not just a musician.

The Tale of Two Restaurant Critics

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Last night this line from T.S. Eliot kept running through my head.  It’s from the Four Quartets. ‘Garlic and sapphires in the mud…’ I remembered that when you got into this it was almost a spiritual thing with you.  You love to eat, you love to write, you love the generosity of cooks and what happens around a table when a great meal is served.  Nothing that went on last night had anything to do with that.  ~ Reichl’s husband criticizing the critic

The Palm smelled of hope and garlic and grilling meat.  p. 108

Ever since I stumbled upon Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, I have been a Ruth Reichl fan.   Her second memoir Comfort Me with Apples cemented my opinion.  Garlic and Sapphires tells the story of her tenure as the restaurant critic at the New York Times.  All three books have excellent recipes (New York Cheesecake, Risotto Primavera, Thai Noodles, Hash Browns, a ten-minute Spaghetti Carbonara, Gougères – cheese puffs, Aushak – an Afghan dish, are just some in this book) decorating the narrative.  

An entertaining bit of Garlic is the story of Ruth’s disguises and the persona she adopts with each wig and outfit.  Ruth wears her departed mom’s dress and becomes Miriam; a champagne wig, nails, heels and a sexy suit create Chloe;  a carrot red wig, large glasses, lipstick and a vintage silk jacket evoke the cozy and crumpled Brenda;  Betty was an old sorry lady in oxfords so bland that she blends in to the crowd.   Reichl tells the back story, how it went down, and then we get to read the actual review that was printed in the Times.  Most of the food reviewed isn’t food *I’m* used to ordering: foie gras, wild hare stew, steamed skate, raw tuna and caviar, risotto with black truffles. But I am enjoying myself (calorie-free!) through Ruth’s remarkable descriptions.  Currently Reichl is my favorite food writer. 

When I realized that Mimi Sheraton had previously held the same job and wrote her own memoir, I decided to read the two books back to back. 

Where Reichl drew me in, Sheraton pushed me away.  It reminded me of the self-absorbed drivel you sometimes endure from a stranger at a party.  Example: So whenever I am asked, “How can I become a food critic like you?” I am always tempted to answer, “Live my life.”   There were many references that only residents of NYC could catch. 

I had a head cold; in the grips of a passive indecisive misery, I kept plodding along.  Lo, during the last fifth of the book, I started to perk up.  I was compelled to write down a few quotes.  Here are a few.  Enjoy them, skip this book and read Reichl.

Not to taste while cooking is much like
choosing a color scheme with closed eyes. p.219

Wrinkled ripeness in fruits, as in people,
seems anathema to many Americans.  p. 229

It is better to be good
than to be original.
~ Robert A. M. Stern, architect

Just as some women gather jewels that they contemplate
occasionally to cheer themselves up,
so I can unwrap memories of favorite meals,
a far less fattening pursuit than eating them.  p.237

  

The Art of Civilized Conversation

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I felt it shelter to speak with you.
~ Emily Dickinson

[The art of conversation] is the Swiss Army knife
of social skills that anyone can learn to use. p.1

As much as we try to avoid it, there are times when we have to talk to strangers. 

Sometimes we need to sustain a conversation with strangers, acquaintances, or friends of friends.  When I served on Grand Jury for two months we had hours of in-between time where we had the choice of looking down and doodling or looking up at a fellow juror and launching a conversation. 

Shepherd’s book would have been a blessing.  Most of it is common sense clearly explained.  I tried to read it looking for me and my weaknesses (rambling, interruptions) rather than identify people I know in the author’s descriptions.  She introduces some great phrases: conversation kindling, verbal tics, rapport vs. report.  Since we all blunder, Shepherd tells us how to recover from them.

Did you know?

~  It is courteous to stand up for an introduction.
~  Order of introductions: first say name of the lady,
the elder, the honored person.
[By mixing these I made the mnemonic acronym HELP. ]
~ Think of talk as a good game of Frisbee.  Toss it to someone else.

Ten Rules of Conversation

1.  Tell the truth.
2.  Don’t ramble.
3.  Don’t interrupt.
4. Ask questions and listen to the answers.
5. Don’t take advantage of people.
6.  Don’t dwell on appearances.
7.  Don’t touch taboo subjects.
8.  Disagree in a civilized fashion.
9.  Don’t be a bore.
10.  Don’t gossip.

Five Fail-Safe Starters

1.  The journey.  Are you from here?  How did you get here?
2.  The recent past.  What have you been working on?
3.  Situation you share now.  How do you know ___?
4.  Companions.  Do you have family* nearby?
5.  Return questions.  Ask her what she just asked you.

Funny Quote

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes.
Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

~  Sir Anthony Hopkins

Whether small talk makes you hum or gives your hives, I recommend this little book.   I also recommend Margaret Shepherd’s other book, The Art of the Handwritten Note. 

*Shepherd makes a point of using the word family.  While people may not have a spouse or children, everyone, presumably, has family.