This Reminds Me

My single-parent, gotta-get-to-work mom always had a book with her.  She had a book in her car.  On the kitchen table.  By her chair in the den.  In the bathroom.  By her bed.  In her purse.  I totally understand that behavior now.  When I find those spare five or 10 minutes, I want to wipe the hem of my dress on my reading glasses and crack the spine of sublime distraction.

I’ve never enjoyed a richer reading year than 2007.  Sure, I stumbled across a few clunkers.  Used to be, I thought if I started a book, I had to finish it.  Not any longer.    No good – Goodwill bag.  And lots of books were merely  ”okay,” which, in a more sparse year, is filling if not satisfying.

But this year – oh, this year…….15 gems….

IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

Post-nuke The Road won the Pulitzer for a reason.  It’s far and away the most memorable book I’ve read in years.  There’s imagery of this father and school-age son trudging toward a (hopefully) warmer climate I will never forget.  “They were each other’s whole world” – with the bleak physical world around them offering no succor.  After I finished it, I read chunks again before passing it onto to Judy – who read it twice, back to back.  I still find myself reading snatches of display copies at Costco, Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc.  The style is irritating – stream of consciousness run-on sentences with little puncutation.  No quotes, no “he said, she said.”  And like Faulkner, he infuses different time periods occassionally, and you’ve got to be awake to sort them out into the time line.  Like Rebecca, don’t look for the principal’s name – it’s not there.  I don’t try to limit my kids’ reading but I would not allow them to read The Road now and wouldn’t encourage them to do so until young adulthood.

This is “the one” I’ll remember from 2007.

Two plot lines converged in The Brief History of the Dead – A woman on a commercial venture in Antartica, and a man seemingly unanchored in an alternate (and shrinking) world.  Seldom have I digested such an intriguing tale that is horrifying without being horrible.  I keep pushing Lois to give it a try.  If you’ve read it, you know I looked twice at the Diet Coke I was sipping while doing so.

A school chum of Rachel’s was reading Alas, Babylon and Rachel – knowing my love of survivor tales – couldn’t believe I hadn’t read it.  So of course I did.  It’s a classic nuke/post-nuke yarn and yet….it isn’t.  Way too fanciful to be gripping.  I think it’s more a 1950′s societal drama.  I picture Mayberry in a snow globe, with nuclear flakes floating all around.  A woman president (because she’s the only Cabinet member left alive)?  Black and white neighbors working together and actually enjoying each other’s company?  Urbanites finding satisfaction in agrarian life?  Yep, I think that one’s for a 50′s sociology class – an interesting slice’o'time.

It’s not The Stand, but Earth Abides is a well-written portrayal of one man’s journey to normalcy in the 50′s after a virus wipes out almost all people.  Basically, as he ages, his tribe becomes more and more primitive - an interesting contrast.  I love the symbol of the massive library – the seat of knowledge – becoming more and more overgrown with advancing vegetation as more and more knowledge is lost to each generation that camps around it.  “I am the last American,” wrote George Stewart – and this book was the first of its kind on U.S. shelves in 1950.

Remember the 1998 movie Deep Impact?  Well, it was largely based on Lucifer’s Hammer, a 1977 sci fi classic.  Yeah, yeah, the comet hits the earth and there’s mass destruction – but that’s not the good part.  The good part revolves around a settlement of civilized people determined to survive against a warring band of cannibals.  New religions form while family norms change…all while a group of savages plans their attack.  Truthfully, a editor should have whacked a lot of extraneous characters. and sometimes the dialogue is downright tedious.  But hey – it’s a good story.

IF YOU CAN WALK TO GET THIS BOOK- THANK JONAS SALK.  OR MAYBE ALBERT SABIN.

Polio is less the story of the disease than it is the definition of America in one of its finest hours – a country united to fight a scourge crippling and killing its children.  The rivalry between Salk (killed vaccine) and Sabin (live vaccine) is exposed in rich detail, but that wasn’t nearly as interesting to me as was the history of the March of Dimes – the first true charity of the masses, with Franklin D. Roosevelt as its chief promoter.  Mothers collecting change door-to-door, ordinary people rushing to faraway towns to hastily construct wooden field hospitals, rural neighbors taking shifts to operate the hand pumps of iron lungs during power outtages – that shows what a country united can do when a disease is doing its worst.

WEATHER OR NOT YOU’RE INTO METEOROLOGY – BOTH EXCELLENT

I’ve always been a Depression/WWII history geek so I knew I’d enjoy The Worst Hard Time. I just didn’t expect to learn as much as I did about weather and topography, all threaded through journals, interviews and fascinating recounts of swirling dust storms.  Every time I see a Bell jar now, I think of canned tumbleweed, and thank God my children are not dying by inches of dust lung.

Over the years, I’d noted references to the incredible winter storm of 1888, commonly called The Children’s Blizzard.  I picked this book up and put it back down a dozen times before finally buying it  My hesitation was foolish.  I was totally engrossed in the chronicles of five (mostly immigrant) families on the High Plains and the effects of the massive storm that killed hundreds of settlers.  The January day began warm, so most children had on no coats, gloves or any insulation during the deadly walk home as tempatures plummeted.  Reading first-person accounts of survivors and parents desperate to find their children was chilling – emotionally and physically.  I found myself shivering as I turned pages on hot summer days.

CHICK BOOKS

I wasn’t too sure about As the Crow Flies.  The plot lines sounded like a Campbells Soup casserole gone bad – too much of this, so add some of that, swoosh it all around, add some other stuff, and gosh – will you really like this mess?  In this twist-at-the-end tome, we have a Nazi war criminal, a tragedy in Vietnam, child abuse, Catholic permentation, an unusual immigrant family with adopted children, NASA history and 60′s nostalgia – largely experienced by the school-age daughter of a Royal Canadian Air Force officer.  I decided to give it 50 pages.  Ha!  It totally hooked me.  Started off slow and sweet, whipping in more and more plot lines, twists and revelations.  I never would have guessed the ending – which made perfect sense.   Child abuse was also a theme of Ann Marie MacDonald’s first book, Fall on Your Knees. I’m thinking CPS should have had an interest in her childhood.  I’ll be watching for her third book fer shure.

The problem with every Jodi Picoult novel is that it’s not My Sister’s Keeper – which, in 2006, I could hardly put down.  Nineteen Minutes isn’t quite that good, but is still tasty.  This story of a 19-minute rampage by a high school student gunman shows the slow build-up of fury, distrust, isolation and pain that led to horror.  Did it make me condone murder?  Absolutely not.  Did it help me better understand the tortured mind of the gunman?  Yes, it did.  I congratulated myself for divining part of the twist at the end.  She always delivers a doozy.

DAUGHTERS (sigh)

Rachel wants everyone to know – today is her half-birthday.  She is exactly 16 1/2 today.  Here’s your shout-out, Rach!  Now please unload the dishwasher.

Do you like Big Love? Then you’ll be engrossed in Daughter of the Saints, which many deem the single best first-person narrative of polygamy.  Written by the only daughter of her father’s fourth plural wife – #28 of 48 children in the family - Dorothy Allred Solomon obviously loved her parents, but not their lifestyle, nor the grinding poverty that often accompanied it.  “Happiness is a do-it-yourself-project.”

Two families’ adoptions of Korean baby girls is the backdrop of Digging to America, a novel about cultures (and people) bending and blending.   How do you graft a child of a different culture into a family tree, especially if that family is itself transplanted?  How do friendships and romance form among very different people?  Digging to America is neither deep, nor pithy but as the mother of a child from a very different culture, I saw a bit of myself in each of the families.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Our Wednesday night class read and discussed Traveling Light, chapter by chapter – often uncomfortable sessions as we revealed the burdens we carry that God never intended we pack.  Every Max Lucado book I read, I think, “Ohh!  This is the best one.”  Well, this was really was.

THANKS, MOM, FOR TEACHING ME TO LOVE TO READ.  I THOUGHT OF YOU TURNING EVERY PAGE OF THESE TWO TERRIFIC TRUE-LIFE TOMES.

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio reminded me so much of my mother, who also “contested.”  And who could write or tell anything and make it funny, often in 25 words or less.  There’s no need to write fiction books about women as remarkable as Evelyn Ryan or my mom.  Their true life stories say all that needs to be said.

A darker sequel to A Girl Named Zippy, She Got Up Off the Couch chronicles her mother’s transformation from smart-but-uneducated, pork rind-smacking Hoosier housewife to single college professor.  Her mother’s life turned upside down when her unfaithful husband left her  She could either turn, too – or die by inches each day.  She turned.  And triumphed.   Haven’s pride is palatable, as is her pain as other family relationships soured.  I read Haven Kimmel’s first novel this year, too – The Solace of Leaving Early. Not great, but intriguing.  This girl can write.  I will be watching for her next one.

I must go read a few pages of Let’s Not Go to the Dogs Tonight before bed.  I’m sure you understand.