Catching Up

I’ve gotten behind in my book reviews. My excuse is that I was out in California hanging out with my sisters while my father had surgery, which was very successful. Before long, he’ll be feeling like a 20 year old. You’ll have to ask him if you want to hear the rest of the story!

In any case, I read three very interesting (and different) books.

Being Dead by Jim Crace is a very unusual book that details the consequences (biological as well as emotional) of the deaths of two people, Joseph and Celice. They had headed out to the beach where they had first met, for nostalgia’s sake and to lay to rest ghosts from the past, but are brutally murdered by a man who only wants to rob them of their money and somewhat meager possessions. Before their bodies are found a week or so later by their estranged daughter, we learn about their initial meeting, their emotionally empty life together, and about the natural processes by which decaying bodies are returned to the earth, if not interrupted. Crace’s writing is tight, vivid, poetic, and compelling. Here, he conveys their daughter’s thoughts at her parent’s funeral:

But she had at least an answer to the lesser question. How would the dying spend their time when life’s short portion shrinks with every waking day? She’d walked to see mortality that Sunday afternoon and found her parents irredeemable. Her gene suppliers had closed shop. Their daughter was next in line. She could not duck out of the queue. So she should not waste her time in this black universe. The world’s small, breathing denizens, its quaking congregations and its stargazers, were fools to sacrifice the flaring briefness of their lives in hopes of paradise or fears of hell. No one transcends. There is no future and no past. There is no remedy for death – or birth – except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.

Next, I read The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. I’m not going to write about that now, but will save that until after my book club meets to discuss it. Maybe I can get some of the other book clubbers to post their thoughts.

This morning I finished An Unfinished Life by Mark Spragg. Though not nearly as literary or profound as these other books, this was a book that I just could not put down. It tells the story of a fractured family, and the events that lead them back together. The emotional core of the story is a 9-year-old girl named Griff. Griff and her mother flee her mother’s abusive boyfriend, returning to Wyoming, which her mother left before Griff was born in order to escape her guilt and sorrow after the death of her husband (and Griffs father). In Wyoming, Griff comes to know her grandfather (whom she thought was dead) and his life-long friend, Mitch, who was grotesquely maimed after an encounter with a grizzly bear. You can probably guess what happens in this book, nothing is particularly novel or surprising. But the characters are drawn with so much heart, and their desires and fears are so universal, that the story completely drew me in.

72 Hour Hold

Reading this book by Bebe Moore Campbell, I wasn't sure if it was fiction or non-fiction. 72-Hour Hold is the story of a woman trying to deal with her 18-year-old daughter's bipolar illness. It's a harrowing story filled with interesting, realistic characters. At times, it reads more like a diary (this happened, and then that happened) than a novel, but for the most part the story is compelling and moves along quickly. Campbell, who is African American, draws parallels between mental illness and slavery, which I thought were particularly powerful. But the most heart-wrenching parts of the story are the mother's anguish over her daughter's pain and her own helplessness in dealing with the mental health system. Whether it's bipolar illness, another form of mental illness, drug abuse, or any of the myriad other things that we worry about as parents, our own helplessness is what makes the situation positively unbearable.

I listened to, rather than read, this book, and did not particularly like the reading by Pamella D'Pella. D'Pella uses different voices to portray the various characters, but with so many characters, she ends up using the same voice for several characters, which I found extremely annoying. Thus, Clyde, the protagonist's ex-husband, and Bethany, the mother of another child with mental illness have the same grating voice. All of the nurses and social workers speak with similar Asian-sounding accents, and several young women charaters speak like breathless baby dolls. This definitely detracted from the telling of the story, and left me wondering how well written the book actually is. I guess I'll have to read it to find out.

My Apolitical Blog

My blog is decidedly apolitical, primarily because I think the political blogosphere already has many eloquent voices to which my voice would add little. One of my favorite blogs (other than Josh's, of course) is The Cunning Realist. On August 12, this self-described life-long conservative penned a particularly powerful entry, called " Decency Is Not In Them," about Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq who has been camping out in Crawford, Texas, hoping to meet with GWB while he is on vacation. Read it.

A Peachy Weekend

Last weekend, Garrett and I picked blueberries, blackberries, peaches, and nectarines at Weaver's. So this weekend it was time to do something with all those peaches and nectarines (last weekend we made blackberry sorbet, which I thought was amazing, and Garrett said it had no taste!). For Julle and Lee's party on Saturday, I made a nectarine and lime curd tart with brown sugar crust that was really delicious and beautiful. Then, on Sunday, to make up for the cancelled sparkling wine dinner at Mosaic, we had Rick & Faye and Joe & Susan over for a peachy dinner. We made grilled pork tenderloins with peach and ginger sauce, which is one of my favorite pork tenderloin recipes. Garrett made garlic and basil mashed potatoes to accompany the pork and they were fantastic. With dinner, we had two wonderful bottles of wine: a Pokerville Zinfandel from Karly, and a Bonterra Chardonnay. For dessert, we made a luscious peach ice cream with vanilla scented peaches. That ice cream maker we got is really getting a work out, and we are enjoying everything that comes out of it.

Another wonderful meal with great friends. I almost forgot to mention that in honor of the cancelled sparkling wine dinner, we started out with a Mumm Brut Prestige sparkling wine, which we had along with some excellent cheese and crackers. Mumm describes this wine as being a "delicate golden peach color," which fit in nicely with the whole peach theme.

The Things They Carried

The news from Iraq has been really grim this week. At least 22 marines killed in a war premised on lies. All this was in the back of my mind as I listened to The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. O’Brien served in Vietnam and is a fabulous writer and story teller. It’s an odd book: not a book of short stories but a group of stories. It reads like a memoir but isn’t; reads like non-fiction but isn’t. Is it truthful? I think it is. Fiction is often more truthful than non-fiction, I think, because in non-fiction the writer has to carefully document each event, and leave out those which can not be documented. But in fiction, the writer can tell stories based in truth but transformed by perceptions, opinions, beliefs, memories, fears, shame, consequences, and a host of other things that make a story more real than reality. In any case, it’s a great book, although some of the stories are pretty gory and difficult to take. It’s a book that I think would have been better read than listened to. O’Brien’s writing is so good that I kept thinking, “I want to remember how he said that,” but there’s no going back (easily) in an audio book… no re-reading a sentence to fully understand how the writing itself enhances the story.