lis.dom

High on Arrival by Mackenzie Phillips — I actually had little notion of or interest in Mackenzie Phillips, but I love drug addict memoirs, so I picked this up when it rotated through the library. It comes with the special added bonus of being an incest memoir. It may well not be up your alley.

[reread] The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein — It’s possible that I reread this book too often. But not probable.

Nobody’s Girl by Antonya Nelson — I ran across this in our collection and picked it up because I used to love a song of the same name sung by Bonnie Raitt. When I read the blurb and discovered this was about a young woman from the Chicago suburbs who decides to move to a small desert town in New Mexico, I figured I’d better read it. It took me a long time to get through it, but it was pretty good, though not really similar to my own experience except in feeling.

Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times by Thomas Hauser — For our Wyoming Humanities Council book discussion series of biographies of American cultural icons. I ended up spending a lot of time talking about the history of the civil rights movement and its various strands and bringing in a whole stack of books, which just goes to show I guess that one’s extracurricular collecting habits do eventually play some role.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen — I love Franzen’s essays most of all, but I liked this quite well — perhaps even better than The Corrections. Despite what you may have read about it plot-summary-wise, it’s really a novel about falling in love and out of love and trying to figure out how to differentiate who you are from who you want to be.

[reread] The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley — When in danger or in doubt, reread.

[reread] The Rooms of Heaven by Mary Allen — Reread shortly after I accepted my new job. The book is about many things, but I reread it primarily because it is set here in my home town of Iowa City, and because it is full of places and people that I knew and wanted to reacquaint myself with.

Perfect Reader by Maggie Pouncey — A charming and hysterically funny (well, hysterically funny if you have any connection to academia) book about a young woman who becomes her father’s literary executor.

Eleanor Roosevelt Volume 1 by Blanche Wiesen Cook — The next entry in our Icons discussion series. Eleanor Roosevelt is one of those people who was, it seemed to me, So Admired by so many people that I figured she must actually be rather dull to read about. I was very pleasantly surprised to find that that was not the case.

Up From the Blue by Susan Henderson — My idea of a psychological thriller is a book just like this one — a book where you suspect and are afraid that frightening things are happening, but you can’t quite figure out what they are, or what they mean, or even whether or not they are totally real. Throw in a (mostly) kid narrator and some mental illness, and I’m hooked.

The Good Daughters by Joyce Maynard — I breezed through this women’s fiction page turner (to reduce a book utterly to a genre phrase) in one day on one of the last weekends I was avoiding packing while I was still living in Wyoming. As long-time readers of this blog will know, I am a sucker for novels with family secrets, and this has them in spades.

Jane Fonda’s War by Mary Hershberger — The final book for our Icons discussion. As I mentioned to several people, I think it’s probably good that it was my last discussion in Meeteetse, or I’m not sure anyone would have shown up, due to the intense hatred of Jane Fonda. The most tangible similarity among all the people whose biographies we read is that they all had FBI files; all of them but Eleanor Roosevelt were against the Vietnam War (and one imagines she would have been, too, had she been alive). Muhammad Ali was in far more trouble than Fonda over his opposition to the war at the time, but he is now revered as a hero, and she’s still hated. No one was able to solve this particular mystery at our discussion, but it made good fodder.

[reread] Deerskin by Robin McKinley — Usually when I move to a new place to embark on a new endeavor, I reread The Blue Sword, but as it’s about moving to a desert outpost and I was about to leave my desert outpost, I went with some other McKinley books instead.

Girls to the Front by Sara Marcus — I wasn’t a riot grrrl in any conscious fashion; I didn’t hear the term or most of the music till I got to college. But this book covers exactly the years I was in high school, and its descriptions of what the world was like then were so completely spot on for me. I hated high school, but those years have a particular poignancy nonetheless. The “first” Gulf War is the first war I ever protested. I remember standing outside the Emma Goldman Clinic when Operation Rescue stopped in Iowa City in 1991. And I remember going to so many shows — the Pixies in Davenport, the benefits in the Unitarian Church basement — where the whole front of the room was dominated by the mosh pit. If a riot grrrl band had ever played there, if one of them had said, before the set, that they wanted all the girls to come up to the front — I would have been there. Immediately.

She Got Up Off the Couch by Haven Kimmel — The she in the title is Kimmel’s mother, who got up off the couch in their rural Indiana home after seeing a television ad wherein Abe Lincoln said she could go back to school. She got a college degree and a masters and became a teacher, and this book is about that, but it’s also, like A Girl Named Zippy, just an excellently (I might even say zingily) written portrait of a place and its people. And it’s funny. And true.

Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House by Meghan Daum — Daum’s memoir-ish book about houses and homes wins the prize for the funniest book I read this year, but it also hits poignantly close to home for me. Like Daum, I have moved a somewhat uncountable number of times (I’ve never lived in a house longer than four years, ever), and I also lust after real estate. Reading this book as I perch in my friends’ house, where I’ll be staying and then housesitting for the next 7 months, made for a particularly rich experience, as the beauty of transience is that you can always imagine that the perfect dwelling really is out there. Daum captures that perfectly.

Claiming Ground by Laura Bell — Because I grew up in Iowa City (and later attended graduate school there), home of the Iowa Writers Workshop, I have heard a lot of authors talk and read from their books, and I have read a great many books and stories set in my hometown or some place very like it. It’s sort of a game, really — seeing how quickly you can figure out which bar the characters are meeting up at, or deducing what apartment someone lived in during the time their memoir takes place, or whatever. Reading Laura Bell’s book was my first real experience of that in Wyoming (there are other books about this part of the world — Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces and Mark Spragg’s Where Rivers Change Direction spring to mind first — but this is the first one I read while living here). Reading it brought the particular delight recognizing people and places that I know, or know of, but it is also a good read as a memoir by a woman trying to figure out how to belong to a place she is not from.

Illyria by Elizabeth Hand — A good but peculiar young adult novel about theatrically and romantically inclined cousins. I say peculiar because the book is told by a first person adult narrator about her young adulthood, and it ends with the narrator as an adult, which made it seem like an old-fashioned book in many ways (my unscientific perception being that the adult narrator looking back was more common in children’s and YA books of the earlier parts of the 20th century, before the YA explosion of recent years). The story is told by Maddy and is about growing up in what had been a large extended theatrical family that was merely now a large extended rather complacent family, except for Maddy and her cousin Rogan, who were theatre mad and also in love. The main part of the story deals with their high school’s production of Twelfth Night, in which they both star, and of what happens to them afterward, and what eventually reunites them.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman — I loved this book, and then I got taken to task by my very smart friends for not questioning why the gay character must be a tortured youth aspect and for not recognizing that the main female character is not really allowed to be much of a character. I will cop to that. I still loved the idea of magic in this book — that it’s not really actually all that good for anything — and so you have all these with a lot of skills and really no actual purpose in life. Given that that’s pretty much exactly how I felt upon finishing my fancy liberal arts college, I suppose it makes sense that I related to the book. I also found it wickedly funny, and if you’re a fan of children’s fantasy literature in general and Narnia in particular, you’ll have a great time picking out all the references.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan — I love the New York Times reviewer who began his review this way:

If you’re like me, you tend to regard plot summaries as a necessary boredom at best. They’re the flyover country between a reviewer’s landing strips of judgment, revealing almost nothing about the way a book actually works, almost nothing about why it succeeds or fails. . . . At least this is how I felt until I read Jennifer Egan’s remarkable new fiction.

He then proceeds to try to summarize the plot (I’ll let you click through for it), which is crazy and both epic and quotidian. I loved Egan’s first novel, The Invisible Circus, so much that I sort of keep hoping she’ll write it again. She never has, and her subsequent novels are so very different from that one that I always think I’m not really going to like them, but then I read them and I do. This one, in particular, reminds me of what my grandmother once told me: that you never really know when someone is going to show up in your life. A Visit from the Goon Squad is that in literature, writ large.

R Exposure by Kathryn Harrison — Something I read online somewhere made me think I should reread this, but I can no longer remember what. In any case, I love Kathryn Harrison, and this one was worth revisiting.

Father of the Rain by Lily King — One of the best and most satisfying novels I’ve read in a long time. It’s decidedly one where describing the plot — which deals with Daley growing up with her alcoholic father, leaving him, and going back to try to help him — doesn’t do it justice at all.

Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship by Gail Caldwell — Caldwell’s memoir about her friendship with Caroline Knapp (author, most famously, of Drinking: A Love Story) is about dogs and rowing and dealing with death and grief and being a recovering alcoholic and various other things, but the parts that interested me most were those that dealt with being a single woman. Not single in a Bridget Jones/Sex and the City/constantly on the lookout for the next guy, if not The One kind of a way, but single in a living by yourself and having your life and being happy kind of a way. There’s not enough of that narrative in the world.

Cash by Johnny Cash — Our first book for this year’s book discussion group. I made everyone watch the video of Hurt, but what was most interesting to me was hearing from people — our group ranges from age 34 to age 76 — about their experiences listening to Cash over the years, and their sense of how he was talked about in their youth.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan — I knew going into this story told by two high school students named Will Grayson from two very different Chicago suburbs that I would love it, and I was not disappointed. As with many of John Green’s books, I found the ending a wee bit over the top, but I sort of don’t care, because a) it’s fiction and b) the characters and the writing and the dialogue are so wonderful and funny. Actually, b) is the far more important point. I often say that I know I really, really love a book when I find myself punching the sofa during particularly good bits. This book and Father of the Rain were the big couch punching books this summer.

American Taliban by Pearl Abraham — This is a novel that is not actually based on the story of John Walker Lindh — in fact, he shows up in the narrative toward the end, just so you know for sure the protagonist isn’t him — although it is a novel about a young American who becomes entranced with Arabic, goes to Pakistan to study, and becomes entranced there with militants in the mountains and ends up going to Afghanistan with them. Like this reviewer, “my first move after finishing was to Google Lindh,” which was interesting, because I read very little of the coverage of him at the time because it made me so angry. Nine years later, I am still incredibly angry about this country’s treatment of the Muslim world and political prisoners, and at its incredible lack of respect for subtlety, and many other related issues, but I’ve calmed down enough to consider, at least, and enough time has gone by that more subtle things have been written. In addition to the New Yorker story linked above, you might also enjoy this piece from Esquire about Lindh in prison. But back to the book, for a moment — it’s good, though maddening at times, particularly toward the end. If anyone else out there reads it, or has read it, I’d love to discuss the ending.

Fat Girl by Judith Moore — There is a great deal of hatred for this book among fat-acceptance activists, at least to judge by Amazon reviews, which I didn’t look at until I was sitting down to write this post. I think it’s a misplaced anger, or an anger based on a misunderstanding of the book (which is a devastating account of both growing up fat and having a truly horrific mother, and yet isn’t at all self-pitying). Consider this, from the opening: “Narrators of first-person claptrap like this often greet the reader at the door with moist hugs and complaisant kisses. I won’t. I will not endear myself. I won’t put on airs. I am not that pleasant. The older I get the less pleasant I am.” Of course, telling the reader you are not endearing is a pretty good way of endearing yourself to this reader, as is writing well — and ultimately, I am afraid, my allegiance to good writing outweighs my allegiance to just about anything else.

Red Line by Charles Bowden — Charles Bowden is my new crush. This is an old and peculiar book that is half memoir, half narrative of trying to trace down the life of a Mexican drug dealer who was executed outside Tucson. It’s full of lines like “Without the music, the last few decades would remain political prisoners of the New York Times” and “I do not care about the table setting, I eye the knife.” And he has the best hat ever.

Boys and Girls Like You and Me by Aryn Kyle — Kyle wrote a great novel about a girl and horses and early adolescence and grief and western Colorado called The God of Animals. This is a collection of stories that, I would guess, were mostly written earlier and dug out to publish after her novel was successful. They are quite good, although I suspect they are probably more appealing to my general demographic than to the broader readership of the world. If you like what I think of as serious chick lit, you’d like these.

The Stormchasers by Jenna Blum — I will generally read almost any novel that deals with mental illness, because I am interested both in mental illness itself and in portrayals of it. This is a fast (as in fast-moving), semi-melodramatic about fraternal twins, a brother and sister. The brother has bipolar disorder and the sister does not; she lost touch with him twenty years ago but then gets a call from a psychiatric hospital where he’s been admitted, only to discover that he’s not there when she arrives. She knows he loves to chase storms, and it’s that season, so she gets her editor to let her cover a stormchasing tour in hopes of finding him. I don’t really think it’s fair to ask the portrayal of one person to be representative of all people with a particular disorder, because how could it be? Charles, the character in this book, isn’t every person with manic depressive illness, but he seems to me like a fair portrayal of one.

The Myth of You and Me by Leah Stewart — Childhood friends suffer a rift and, through mildly improbably circumstances, are brought back together again. I should be more bothered by the contrivances of the plot and the improbably happy ending, but I am endlessly fascinated by friendships, and thus I liked this book.

Live Through This by Debra Gwartney — Part of this story — before it became a book — was on an episode of This American Life some years ago. It’s a memoir about how Gwartney’s two older daughters ran away from home when they were 14 and 16 and lived as street kids, first in their town, and later in San Francisco and elsewhere, and how Gwartney tried to find them and get them to come back, and the ways in which she succeeded and failed. I used to know a fair number of street kids, kids who mostly, like Gwartney’s daughters, had homes but chose not to live in them, and because I was a kid myself, I was always on their side. Their home lives doubtless were horrible — if not outright abusive, then intolerable in some other way. And I was a great believer in self-determination, for people as well as nations, and I hate to see anyone being harassed by the police, as these kids frequently were. I never considered their parents, and what they might actually be like, and how they might feel, and now I realize that probably some of them were like Gwartney — confused and overwhelmed and overly attached, but not monsters. I’d never considered what it might be like to be the mom of one of those kids and not know where that kid was. The book is not prescriptive about parents or runaways, and I’m not either, but I was glad to read it for the whole new angle it gave me on something I thought I pretty much knew all about.

The Butterfly Mosque by G. Willow Wilson — I fell in love with North Africa at a young age, dating, I suppose, from my mother reading King of the Wind to me. I’ve always suspected that this means my love of the place and of Islam is just the sort of exotic, Orientalist view of things that, while I suppose preferable to intolerance and hatred in some respects, ultimately causes just as many problems. I just went over to glance at the opening of King of the Wind again, and, indeed, Marguerite Henry refers to Muslims as Mohammedans, and the illustrations are full of minarets and turbans. I forgive her in part because the book was published in 1948, and in part because I believe it was meant respectfully, whatever its flaws. And I know that Henry fought with her editors to be able to publish a book in which the main characters were a horse and a mute Moroccan boy. My love for and understanding of Islam may have more to do with my mother’s explanation of Ramadan to me when she was reading the book to me and later her telling me about Malcolm X making a hajj to Mecca than it does with my specific memories of the book, but that’s where I pin it.

Anyway, this is all a very long-winded way of getting around to saying how much I loved The Butterfly Mosque and what a good instruction it was for me in the ways in which even a fairly enlightened Westerner can misapprehend another culture. Willow Wilson was born and raised as an atheist in Colorado but always felt somewhat uncomfortable with atheism. She was interested in Islam, had studied some Arabic in college, and was sort of adrift, so she took up an offer to teach English at a school in Cairo. She converted, met and fell in love with an Egyptian, married and lived for several years full-time in Cairo; they now (according to the author biography) split their time between Cairo and Seattle. This all takes place not too long after September 11, so as you may imagine, it’s an interesting ride.

It’s pretty rare to meet people in my demographic (young, college-educated, liberal-minded) who are religious at all. and thus I find I tend in some ways to feel kinship when I do meet them, even when they are of a different denomination or even an entirely different religion. Anyway, this is a lovely, lovely book, and it continues the unofficial theme of this month’s reading by being very much the story of one person — one person within the context of a religion and two cultures, but one person, with her own quirks and loves and fears and stories — an individual, not a representative.