Spring Reading Roundup

 Nothing like a couple of flights to get some great books read. Here's what I've been reading.

Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver - this is the sequel to the marvelous The Bean Trees and follows the story of Taylor and her adopted daughter, Turtle, three years after the end of the first book. 

I loved everything about Pigs in Heaven--Taylor's ferocious spirit and ethical core shines through and makes the book sing. I also really enjoyed spending more time with Taylor's mother, Alice, who figures much more prominently in this story. 

The gist of the story is that the Cherokee Nation discovers the anomalies in Turtle's adoption; when Taylor finds out that the adoption is being investigated, she literally freaks out and hits the road with Turtle. There is a lot of story and great characters along the way--from a real, live Barbie doll who does not share Taylor's ethical core, to the community of Heaven, Oklahoma that is practically one extended family, to Taylor's boyfriend, Jax, and Alice's cousin Sugar. 

I love small-town stories and this eventually becomes one.

Fun Fact: the title comes from a Cherokee story about the Pigs in Heaven, aka the Pleiades, a constellation that consists of six wayward Cherokee boys and their mother. 

Work Song, by Ivan Doig - another sequel to a wonderful novel, The Whistling Season. This story is all about charming Morrie Morgan and takes place ten years after the first book (i.e., 1919) and is set in Butte, Montana during its heyday as the "copper-capital of the world." 

Morrie lives in a boarding house with a widowed landlady and a couple of ex-miners. He finds work first as an official mourner at wakes and then as a jack-of-all trades at the local library, which is run by a bigwig cattleman and ardent bibliophile. He gets involved in the local miners union, and true to form, comes up with wild and crazy solutions to the problems he and the union face--namely, how to create a stirring work song that will rally the miners and help them stand up to the copper company.

As with The Whistling Season, Work Song, is exuberant, energetic, and a whole lot of fun. While the issues, political and social, are real and sobering--WWI just ended and the Spanish Flu ravaged populations worldwide, unions were fighting for safer conditions and better, more equitable pay--the story itself is wonderful as Morrie deals with the union-busting goons who discover his Chicago past, which he is still trying to outrun. Rabrab (aka Barbara) from Whistling Season is now a 5th grade teacher in Butte and brings her children into his orbit with delightful results, especially Famine, fastest boy in the west. 

Next in the trilogy about Morrie is Sweet Thunder. Can't wait to read it.

Kate & Frida, by Kim Fay - not a sequel but another book by a wonderful author. I read Fay's first book, Love and Saffron, a few years ago and so was eager to read this one. Like Love and Saffron, Kate & Frida is an epistolary novel--letters between two women who strike up a long-distance friendship and become truly best friends.

Kate works in a bookstore in Seattle, and Frida is living in Paris "enroute" to a life as a war correspondent. The novel is set in the 1990s, which was sort of nostalgic in that there are lots of references to 1990s TV, movies, celebrities, politics, etc., but life is not all that different now than then. Of course, now the letters would be emails and not delivered by snails. In the afterword, Fay says that many of the characters and situations were based on real people and events in her life, so I guess she needed to set the novel when she did.

In the course of the three years that the letters span, both Kate and Frida evolve from wanna-be writers to young women with a sense of who they are, what they want, and how they want to live. Not really a coming-of-age story--more of a coming-to-maturity story. My favorite bits, apart from the food descriptions, were when Frida was helping a group of refugee women from war-torn Sarajevo deal with the trauma they faced and the friends/family left behind during the Bosnian War. 

Killers of a Certain Age, by Deanna Raybourn - I discovered this book on Lark Writes. The premise is that four sixty-something female assassins (targeting only the worst of the worst) come out of retirement when they are targeted for assassination. Most of the time reading this, I was reminded of The Golden Girls, with Billie and Mary Alice doubling as Dorothy, Helen was clearly naive Rose, and sexy Natalie was definitely Blanche. No real Sophia, but you can only stretch a parallel so far!

This was great fun to read, but I doubt I will read the second book in the series as I had a bit of a hard time with the whole assassination/killing aspect. I don't believe in vigilante justice, and the story points out that those with the power to name targets can be corrupted. I'd rather see us Gray Panthers sleuthing rather than killing. It is refreshing to see lots of books and TV/films featuring aging boomers who are still active and alert.

Garden Notes

Following age-old guidance, I planted a lot during the past few days of the Flower Moon (what the May full moon is called). The tomatoes and peppers were hardened off and now are in the ground, along with marigolds to keep the bugs at bay. A naturalist friend reminds me that a plant that is not being eaten is not part of the ecosystem, but I planted a whole native flower garden for them to feast upon so that leaving my tomato plants alone is not to much to ask.

Front planter box with coleus and impatiens.

Dining table on deck becomes garden bench!

The petunias are stretching out in their hanging baskets, gearing up for a season of blooms. I've been making pots of coleus and impatiens, which I think look stunning together. And my son and I planted carrots, beets, zucchini, and beans today. This weekend I'll be planting sunflowers as well as a bed of corn/beans/pumpkin (the Three Sisters).

TV Notes

We finally watched the final episode of Northern Exposure earlier this week. I cried. Here's a link to the gorgeous song that ended the series. This isn't footage from the show, but it is the same version of the song, Our Town, by Iris DeMent:

I just started watching Miss Austen--first episode was quite good, with Cassandra's flashbacks to when she and Jane where young. I didn't know that Mary Lloyd, James Austen's second wife, was also related to Cassandra's fiancé, who died before they could marry. Every story needs a villain, and Mary is shaping up to be the villain of this one.

The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver

I really enjoy Barbara Kingsolver's books, but I didn't start reading her until I fell in love with Prodigal Summer, published in 2000. I've read most of what she's published since then, which means I have all her early stuff to read. I started on the backlist with The Bean Trees, published in 1988, and it was fantastic!

Here's the GoodReads synopsis:

Clear-eyed and spirited, Taylor Greer grew up poor in rural Kentucky with the goals of avoiding pregnancy and getting away. But when she heads west with high hopes and a barely functional car, she meets the human condition head-on. By the time Taylor arrives in Tucson, Arizona, she has acquired a completely unexpected child, a three-year-old American Indian girl named Turtle, and must somehow come to terms with both motherhood and the necessity for putting down roots. Hers is a story about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in apparently empty places.

As with most synopses, you get the plot but not the heart and the heart (and writing) are what makes this novel sing. Taylor is a very young woman, but she shoulders the responsibility of caring for an abused baby that is literally thrust upon her. She figures out how to feed, clothe, soothe, and protect this child, and in the process gains a supportive network of friends and allies who become family.

In some ways, the story is dated--of course, there are no cell phones, Amazon, smart watches, and all the other trappings of life in the 21st century--but the themes and stories are timeless. The subplot of Estevan and Esperanza, refugees from Guatemala who fled for their lives, leaving behind their kidnapped and probably murdered daughter, is particularly relevant these days.

The bean trees of the title are wisteria trees--their seed pods look like green beans. Turtle, Taylor's adopted daughter, has a mania for plants, especially vegetables, and she renamed the wisteria "bean trees." Cute, right?!

Fun Fact (and speaking of cute): I found Turtle's favorite book, Old MacDonald Had an Apartment House. Urban gardening without a rooftop garden plot. I may just have to get a copy for my gardening bookshelf!

 

Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver

My last book of 2023, and it was another solid gold 5-star read.

So what did I love about it? I loved how Barbara Kingsolver was both true to her source material, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, and true to herself as a writer with Southern roots and something to say.

Since David Copperfield is one of my favorite Dickens's novels, it was fun to see how she adapted the characters and plot points to fit modern-day rural Virginia. It's a little weird to say the book was fun to read because there is so much tragedy and heartbreak in both stories, but Demon is such a fabulous first-person narrator who has a strong voice, deep survivor instincts, and a big heart that in the end the book was satisfying and left me with a bit broader perspective.

I started this post weeks ago but then felt bogged down because I didn't know what I really wanted to say other than Demon Copperhead is Kingsolver's tour de force. 

Oh yeah, I just remembered something I did want to share--because I know David Copperfield so well, I did stop reading Demon for about a week in the middle because I knew the arc of Emmy (Little Em'ly from David) and didn't want to read this sad part right before Christmas. I ended up finishing it just after Christmas, and this part wasn't as horrific as I anticipated (still rough, but it could've been a lot worse).

One more thing--if you ever have any doubts about how opoid addiction became a major destructive force in our society, read Demon. Even if you don't have doubts, Demon Copperhead is a fabulous book that pays tribute to a fabulous book and shows how great literature gives us stories that transcend time and place.

Top Ten Tuesday - Books on my Spring TBR list

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

The topic for today is books on my Spring TBR list.

Assuming I finish War and Peace this month, and it's highly likely as I am beyond the point of no return (aka past the half way mark), here's what I am looking forward to reading:

The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier - the GoodReads group True Book Talk is reading this in April, and I am thrilled. I watched the movie a few years ago and loved it, and got a copy of the book and it has sat on my shelf since then. The movie is set in England, while the novel is set in France, but I think the plot is pretty much the same.

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver - I'm a Kingsolver fan and have heard good things about this novel.

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon - another bookclub book, this time with the JASNA Denver/Boulder reading group.

Before I Grow Too Old: A walk from John O'Groats to Land's End by Pat Jilks - my daughter read this, enjoyed it, and lent it to me as she knows how much I want to do this walk and how much I love reading about walking journeys.

Kingbird Highway: The Biggest Year in the Life of an Extreme Birder by Kenn Kaufman - my husband just read this, and recommended it. We are celebrating our 35th anniversary in May with a trip to a birding festival, and this will be perfect prep for the vacation. Incidentally, we had planned to go to Lake McConnaughy in Nebraska to see the sandhill crane migration, but cancelled because of the Bombogenesis storm that knocked the socks off of Colorado and is causing massive flooding the Midwest. 

Song of the Lark by Willa Cather - speaking of Nebraska and eastern Colorado, I am eager to read this classic and hope to get to it this spring.

Three Newish Novels and a Giveaway

Sometimes it feels like I only read classics, but I've just finished three recently published novels, so clearly perception and reality are not exactly aligning.

I'm a big fan of Barbara Kingsolver's writing, fiction and non-fiction, and recently listened to Flight Behavior.  It took a little while to get into the story--at times I felt like I could never relate to someone like Dellarobia, the main character, and the setting, rural Tennessee, seemed more foreign to me than Victorian London, but I stuck with it and ended up loving the book.  

By far my favorite character was Ovid Byron, the scientist who comes to Dellarobia's hometown to study the millions of monarch butterflies who migrate there by mistake.  Kingsolver was the reader of the audio version that I listened to and I particularly loved her rendering of his voice, Jamaican accent and all.  I learned so much from Byron, about how scientists view the natural world, why they study it, and how they feel about the objects of their study.

I was honestly surprised by the apocalyptic ending, which reminded me of an image of Noah and his beached ark on Mount Ararat.  I thought the book would end on a hopeful note but be forewarned, this is not a feel-good novel.  It should make you feel a bit panicky if you take the lessons from Dr. Byron to heart.

I also listened to Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge.  This is my first novel by Strout but I liked it so much that I am going to check out her other books.  I really liked the structure of the novel, in which each chapter is a short story.  Some of the stories are directly about Olive, and others she figures in to varying degrees.  

As virtually every other reviewer has noted, Olive is a tough protagonist to like.  She's brusque, but awfully touchy as only the truly brusque can be.  She is easily offended and offends just about everyone she encounters.  Her heart is large and breaks often; she is perceptive and massively myopic.  A study in contradictions, she is probably one of the most real characters I've ever met in a novel.

I enjoyed the setting, a small town in Maine, and the various inhabitants of the town.  An excellent book--creative, interesting, and very real.

The final book in my trio of newbies is The Widow Waltz, by Sally Koslow.  It was the weakest of the three, but still an enjoyable novel.  Unlike Flight Behavior and Olive Kitteridge, The Widow Waltz takes place mostly in Manhattan and the Hamptons.  It is the story of a middle-aged woman who thinks she is well-off until her husband dies and she discovers he's left her virtually penniless with a mountain of debt.

The plot line actually reminded me quite a bit of The Three Weissman's of Westport, which is a modern riff on Austen's Sense and Sensibility.  The location reinforced the similarity as well.

I had to stretch my willing suspension of disbelief to swallow the ending--what happened to the money and how Georgia, the main character, responded to the revelation.

Flight Behavior and Olive Kitteridge are much more complex books than The Widow Waltz, which was far more formulaic and slick than creative and real, but it was a fun book to read.

Giveaway Time!!!!!

Since The Widow Waltz was sent to me by a publicist as part of the rollout of the book, I would like to offer it up as a giveaway.

If you would like to win a copy of The Widow Waltz, just leave a comment and include your email address.  This giveaway is open worldwide and I'll be accepting entries for one week...until 8 pm MT on Sunday, July 14.

Prodigal Summer

I really like Barbara Kingsolver's books but somehow never got around to reading Prodigal Summer until this winter.  As usual with Kingsolver's novels, this one blew me away.  I loved the structure (three stories that interweave), the setting (small farming community in Appalachia), and the message (ecosystems are fragile, balance is critical to the health of the organism, and lifeforms will find a way to reproduce).

There is no better way to jump start spring fever than to read Prodigal Summer in the winter.  I absolutely relished reading about life in all its Appalachian abundance while my own garden is frozen and brown.  I felt my own furnace kick in as I read about Lusa canning cherries, harvesting tomatoes, and befriending misunderstood children, Deanna watching over her mountain's coyote family with a mother's anxious heart, and Garnett thawing his own heart so that his mind could be receptive to a different approach to life.  I'm ready to head up to the garden shop and get some starts of lettuce and peas going!

I tend to earmark pages that contain passages or quotes that speak particularly strongly to me while I'm reading a book.  In reviewing this book's earmarked pages after I was done, I noticed that I had a quote from each on the main threads.  Here's what I marked as worth remembering:

"...God's world and the better part of daily life were full of mysteries known only to women." 
This is from the Old Chestnuts thread, about Garnett Walker and his feud with his neighbor, Nannie Rawley.  Garnett is a widower and he and Nannie, both in their late seventies, fight over his use of pesticides and herbicides.  Garnett is a curmudgeon and proud of it, but also lonely and hapless without his wife, adrift in a world he doesn't understand and that has passed him by.

"...the gospel according to Deanna. It's a sin to kill a spider but not a turkey."  
This is from the Predators thread, featuring Deanna Wolfe, a forty-something forest service employee who has been living alone on the mountain above the farming community she grew up in, enjoying her solitude and communing with nature.  And then, Eddie Bondo, a hunky hunter from Wyoming crosses her path and she learns that opposites attract and he learns that killing predators can be catastrophic to an ecosystem.

"I'm married to a piece of land named "Widener." 
This is from my favorite thread, Moth Love, about Lusa, a young woman from Lexington who marries a farmer, Cole Widener, and has to learn how to deal with her new family and cope with the vagaries of marriage that she never anticipated.  Lusa is a biologist and is in love with bugs and sees human interaction through the eyes of an entomologist   I loved reading about her evolution from larvae to butterfly.  

Prodigal Summer is a beautifully crafted novel, peopled with real characters whose stories work together to convey a world view that is both promising and cautionary.  I loved it, and now I'm ready to plant my garden.

Prodigal Summer is the third book I read for the TBR Pile Challenge.  I really love this challenge--I have those books on my shelf because I figured I would like them.  Being disciplined about rewarding myself with good books is such a win-win.

The Lacuna

I finished listening to Barbara Kingsolver's latest novel The Lacuna over the weekend and was so happy that she salvaged a happy ending out of what I saw as an inevitably tragic story.

I listened to most of the book with a sense of dread. For starters, I knew Lev Trotsky was going to be murdered at some point in the story, so I kept on waiting for that to happen. Beyond that, Harrison Shepherd, the protagonist, was so devoid of family and friends, was so naive, talented, and different that oppression, heartache, misunderstanding, and discrimination seemed to me a foregone condition of his life.

I did really enjoy listening to this book, but I'm frustrated that I now don't have a book of marked pages with gorgeous passages to share with you. Both Shepherd and his secretary, Violet Brown, who turns about to be one of his only true friends in his life have a wonderful, distinctive way of delivering truths about people, politics, love, and life that appealed to me so strongly, and yet I can't pull out any examples so you'll have to trust me on that. That's the price of listening and not reading, I suppose.

While I have spent most of my life enjoying history, I honestly don't know a lot about U.S. history in the first half of the twentieth century beyond the headline stories. The Lacuna was a moving way to learn about how Joseph McCarthy and the Committee on Unamerican Activities ruined lives, twisted facts, and gloried in the debasement of political enemies and trampled on free speech and fundamental rights in the name of protecting free speech and fundamental rights.

When I wrote about Canone Inverso recently, I said that it was a twentieth century fable. The Lacuna is as well. It is a sobering, realistic look at how a society, a country, can run so scared that it nearly destroys itself. I used to think that WWII would have been the scariest time in the twentieth century to live through. Now, I think post-WWII was the scariest time.

In addition to the sympathetic character of Harrison Shepherd, who ended up a writer of novels set in pre-Columbian Mexico ("I work for the American imagination" was how he described his occupation), and Violet Brown, and the portrait of life in the U.S. and Mexico from the 1930s to the 1950s, I appreciated The Lacuna as a work of literature. Kingsolver developed her theme of the missing piece of the story from the outset and carried it through beautifully and masterfully. At times, I wondered how she would connect the various elements of Shepherd's story together, but in the end she worked it out satisfactorily as a metaphor, as a theme ("the most important thing about any person is what you don’t know"), and as a plot point.

What makes this book more complex though is that the theme of the missing piece of the story (the lacuna) is juxtaposed with the theme of the "howlers" - specifically the monkeys on Isla Pixol that frighten Shepherd and his mother as the book opens, and metaphorically the press, whose members in the novel merrily violate the notion of free speech by willfully distorting the truth in order to tell the story they think their readers want. So you have the notion of a missing piece of the story (the lacuna), fabricated pieces of the story (the howlers), and a fictional world that consists of historical characters as well as invented ones.

Moving on to the fictional world, I did admire how well Kingsolver created a realistic world by using a narrative structure formed by invented diary entries, real newspaper articles, invented business and personal correspondence, etc. I know other readers have found this a bit jarring, but it was an interesting break from the narrative form that novels usually take. And, for me, it worked.

The only false note was Shepherd's love interest, Tom Cutty, an ultra hip guy he met while working for the government during WWII. I absolutely couldn't see what they saw in each other apart from them both being gay. There seemed to be no common ground, no mutual interests, and physical attraction didn't even seem to play a role. But, that was the only weak part in an otherwise powerful, interesting, sobering, masterful, and ultimately uplifting novel. I'm tempted to say this ought to be required reading in high school American history classes. I'm certainly getting a print copy for my kids to read this summer.

Here's a good interview with Kingsolver on PBS.

Canone Inverso

I learned about Canone Inverso, a novel by Paolo Maurensig, from Maria Grazia at Fly High when she reviewed the movie version that is loosely based on the novel. I read about the book on Amazon and promptly added it to my TBR list for this summer. A business trip last week that involved three lengthy flights provided the reading time for me to dive into this marvelous book. It's a quick read, with beautiful prose translated from Italian to English by Jenny McPhee, and a puzzling, compelling story.

The story is told in layers, by multiple first person narrators, and it loops back on itself, so that even after you read the last sentence you have to recreate the voices to determine whose story you are ultimately hearing. I loved it!

Here's the premise, the narrator tells of purchasing a unique violin at auction and then being accosted by a man who wants to buy it from him because he had heard of it from an itinerant musician, Jeno Varga, who told him his life story, which included a detailed description of the violin and how it was the key to his patrimony. That's the premise, and while Canone Inverso is about self knowledge and what goes into determining who one is, it is also about love and empathy and courage in the face of bureaucracy and a stifling society.

The story of Canone Inverso reads like a modern fable, with Jeno Varga telling the story of his boyhood during the 1930s in eastern Europe. The oppression that Jeno feels in his life as he works to live the life of a gifted artist parallels the rise of fascism that ultimately swallows him whole.

It was interesting reading this story during the time when I was finishing listening to Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, which is also the story of an essentially fatherless boy who only wants to live the life of a artist but who is crushed, spindled, and mutilated by the twentieth century.



I mentioned the beautiful prose of Canone Inverso, and my paperback copy has plenty of earmarked pages. Here are some of the passages that struck me:

A violinist who plays in an orchestra is marked by the instrument that has lorded over him for a lifetime. And with age, the traces of this servitude become increasingly evident...

In describing his first violin instructor, Jeno Varga says,

His sole concern was to raise me in service of the instrument. He treated me like one of those plants that have to be tied to a stake so that as they grow their form becomes beautiful but unnatural. The violin was being grafted onto me in order for it to take root. I too had to merge with it and feel my veins and my nerves infuse its hard wood.

In describing Sophie Hirschbaum, the violinist that Jeno encounters first as an adolescent and whom he searches for throughout his life, he says,

...I was particularly fascinated by her mouth, which suggested something rather painful, like a queen's suspicion that she is actually of plebeian birth.

In describing his relationship to a fellow student at the Collegium Musicum, the militaristic music school he attends and who is a sometime kindred spirit but mostly a rival, Jeno says,

"...our friendship, which had risen to its supreme fulfillment in an original burst of mutual genius, had already...begun its descent, its countdown, or, to use a musical term, its canone inverso.

This might be my favorite line from the book, again from Jeno,

It is ridiculous to talk about what could have been, when we know that life has only a single path--that which we have chosen.

The last two quotes encapsulate the mood and theme of the novel beautifully for me--they are sobering, they are fatalistic, they are elegiac. Thanks, Maria, for writing about the movie and inspiring me to read the novel--it was wonderful!

Barbara Kingslover reads The Lacuna

I'm not yet half way through listening to Barbara Kingsolver read her latest novel (the first in ten years), The Lacuna, but it's such a big project that I wanted to do an intermediate post or two.

At first, I didn't care for Kingsolver's voice, but I've settled into it and I particularly like her Spanish-accented female characters--her older men, not so much.

Since I've started listening to the book, I've had to do a bit of research to discover which characters were historical and which fictional. One third of the way through it, I can confidently announce that Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, along with Leon Trotsy (duh!) are historical and Harrison William Shepherd, the novel's protagonist, and his family are fictional. Not knowing very much about Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century and the format of the novel (i.e., excerpts from diaries, letters, and newspaper articles) made me wonder where history ended and story began, which is exactly Kingsolver's theme, thus far anyway.

As a side note, when I did research Kahlo and Diego, it was Kahlo's paintings that I recognized, although I didn't recognize her name as an artist.



I loved the description of life on Isla Pixol, the island where Shepherd lives with his crazy mother and the first of her sugar daddies during the first section of the book. I loved the description of the food and food preparation, in particular, and still feel the urge to make real Mexican food. If only Kingsolver had provided recipes in The Lacuna as she did in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

My jaw dropped, however, when I read the section in which Shepherd goes to school in Washington D.C. during the early years of the Depression and he visits the encampment of the Bonus Army and how Hoover and the government brutally dealt with them. Somehow this disgraceful event in U.S. history escaped my notice before, and Kingsolver did a masterful job in describing it and seamlessly integrating it into the fabric of the story.

I'm really impressed with Kingsolver's mastery in the book--the scope of the story, the development of the main character as he discovers himself, his talents, his place in history, the balance of historical fact with truthful fiction, and the strong voices that are always filtered by Shepherd yet are still distinct and believable.

As with most great books that I read, they inspire me to dig deeper into their subject matter. My reading list for 2010 is already too long to be completed, but I would love to read more about Mexico in the early twentieth century.