Muse Maria: May 2013

As I listen to the new The National album tonight (hooray!), I'm recounting the books I read since the last few of times I wrote about books (here and here and here). Here they are in the order I read them from longest ago to most recent...

Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson.
I started reading this very funny collection of memoir essays suspecting that I'd read them before. Then I came to the giant rooster chapter and I remembered that I had indeed read this woman's writing before - turns out she's a bigtime blogger (The Bloggess). I identified enough with her needful desire to have her voice heard complicated by her suffocating anxiety that someone would actually read her words - those things, plus her amazing sense of good humor. I like this woman. She's funny and sad and crass and crazy and lovable.

Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuelsson (and Veronica Chambers...apparently).
The true story (or as true as "true stories" can possibly be... maybe 60%, maybe 90%?) of an Ethiopian orphan adopted by a Swedish family - dot dot dot - now famous New York chef and restaurateur married to a supermodel. I liked his motivation, reflections on what it meant to be an adopted son, how food defined family and made memories. Always interested to read an insider story about an industry, especially when it's told with a measure of humility about serious ambition - you know, "look kids, work hard and be clever and you too can cook for the president of the USA someday...even if you don't have to overcome crippling poverty and cultural estrangement first."

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.
Read by me and 8 bazillion others, this murder mystery (or IS IT?) kept me flipping the pages, only getting a little annoyed that I came to despise every. single. character. It's hard to finish a book when you can't root for any of the characters in it - which seems to be a popular thing with authors these days (see The Believers). At any rate, the plotting was pretty clever and kept me guessing.

How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran.
I loved this book so much. A spunky British music critic who is so honest about what it's like to be an awkward girl, to hate yourself, to think you're pretty sexy, to make bad choices, to be so in love, to try to figure out how to be a woman when you're constantly told how to be one by people who don't really care about you or want the best for you. Reading this was like having a very real, very hilarious, slightly drunk conversation with a good friend when you've finally come to terms with being fabulous at an age where you can finally love yourself enough to truly self-deprecate in total love. A bona fide feminist this one.

A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins.
A birthday gift from my father-in-law (which I just realized came out on my actual birthday - good job, Rick!) about a young man exploring the lengths to which artificial intelligence can help him to understand his dead father. Part light "lost in the digital world" satire, and part heartbreaking father/son search for connection, I found it an interesting fictional exploration of how modern technology can only go so far when it comes to human understanding.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett.
A middle-aged, single female scientist goes to the Amazon to follow up on some missing researchers on a lapsed pharmaceutical research project. I thought it would be a Heart of Darkness-type tale, only with women central to the story - a woman gone looking for another woman lost deep in the jungle. Did I mention they are SINGLE. Only SINGLE women have these adventures and only SINGLE women can spare the time and apply the desirous longing of not having a husband and family to their science work. So - a lot of stuff happens with secret fertility drug research, secretive native peoples, secret relationships - and I think this book was probably about many things EXCEPT woman/man relationships and love in that sense. I think it was trying to transcend all that for another kind of human wonder? Hence the natives and butterflies and magic mushrooms and crazy malaria dreams adding up to an alternate imagination of where life might take you when you're busy being a SINGLE professional scientist? I don't even know. I should probably formulate a better thesis because clearly I have more thoughts about this book than I realized...

Sister by Rosamund Lipton.
Those Brits know their way around a crime novel. This book was a trip - totally emotionally engaging with its story of a sister exploring why her younger sister was murdered when she was or wasn't pregnant, and if so, by whom, and it not by whom, then by what entity, and so on... It played fast and loose with time and narration to keep me on my toes. The ending was a surprise and as whodunits go, I could not figure out who done it before it was finally revealed.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple.
An eccentric ex-architect Los Angeles wunderkind now lives in Seattle with her Microsoft-rich tech husband and private-school teenage daughter in a giant, yet-to-be restored leaky stone former school atop Queen Anne Hill. She's clearly suffering from acute anxiety, lost in her perhaps brilliant thoughts and probably more than a little bored with her stay-at-home life. At turns hilarious hijinks and at others, cringe-worthy moments of trying to be a meaningful human, the plot unfolds in an intriguing manner. We know she's gone missing at the very beginning of the book - her daughter pieces the story together through emails, notes, interviews and receipts to try to solve the mystery of where her mother has gone - and who else her mother was...and still is. Really good read! I wanted a sequel or three!

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.
A novel about a small, private Midwest college, their baseball team and a few of the student athletes and faculty who are from there sounds super boring - but it's really really really good. Like a modern day John Irving, the author weaves together the private lives of disparate characters creating a specific tableau of life in situ - their lives in this specific place and time only make sense because of the other lives lived around them that change, inform, abut and reveal their destinies. Such great storytelling and character development. As I read, I thought a lot about who would play these characters on screen when the movie got made, because there is no way this isn't being optioned for a feature film. (I read the "making of" essay published by Vanity Fair afterward - also a good read.)

Room by Emma Donoghue.
Oh god, this book is so good and so disturbing. It's the long (albeit fictional) version of those horrors in the news about women being held sex-slave hostage...with a child born during the ordeal. Told from the point of view of a little boy, we are inside this tiny "room" where he lives with his mother - it's his entire world, he's never been outside. All the horrors are implied, and sometimes narrated innocently - and it really is a book about a mother's love. Every child lives in his mothers' world until preschool or so, this is just another version of that insular space where imagination rules the day (because it has to, no toys), and thoughts of the future and growing up to be something are everything they have to hold on to. Resilience is the key here, and it turns out to be a good story I suppose - although I cannot recommend reading this when a newly minted stay-at-home-all-the-time mother.

The Stonecutter by Camilla Lackberg.
Did I say those Brits and their crime novels? Well - those Swedes and their crime novels, too. A little girl is found murdered in a small fishing village and all the townspeople have something to hide - whether or not it's related to the death central to the book's plot. There's an historical storyline that parallels the modern-day mystery - sort of Shipping News-esque - and I truly could not figure out how they related until the very end. This was a quick, engaging read but it was definitely no Girl with a Dragon Tattoo... it was, however, an interesting exploration of fears of your neighbors - the weird, the gay, the different, the dark, etc... Especially interesting since Sweden is supposed to be that country where everyone accepts everyone else and lets everyone be. (Not so according to a Swedish friend on Facebook today where, I guess, the cops are targeting brown individuals for whatever suspicious activities.)

Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman.
The subtitle pretty much sums up this non-fiction book: "One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting". Living abroad with two little ones, the author marvels at how much better behaved French children seem to be and so sets out on an unofficial sociologic exploration of why exactly. She reports on better diets, "Le Cadre" or "The Frame", sleeping habits, keeping adult time adult-only, and other tried and firmly believed child-rearing methods in France that keep everyone in the family happy. I know a lot of American moms hated this book, but a lot of it makes sense I have to say as a new mom. I appreciate the focus on keeping mom happy as a tool to keeping baby happy, whole family happy. That's always a super great idea!!

Still Points North by Leigh Newman.
I read this book under false pretenses- thinking it was an Alaskan childhood memoir about growing up Last Frontier in the 80's (like me!), I eagerly recommended my whole book club read it. It was only a little bit about that; mostly it was an adult woman (now a New Yorker working in the literary world) trying to suss out her parent's divorce and the resulting emotional terrorism it inflicted upon her life well into her adult, married years. The upside: it made me want to be as Alaskan as we could be - fishing, boating, plane-ing, hunting! - if we're going to live in this state then let's take advantage of it, give our kids crazy stories to regale their big city friends with when they move away from here, "OMG bears and mountains!" they'll possibly say as they order another round of obscenely expensive cocktails at 1am... (I know because I've been that Alaskan child-turned-adult city dweller). The downside: I don't think struggling with your parents divorce in America is enough for a memoir.

Gaining Daylight: Life on Two Islands by Sara Loewen.
Here's another Alaskan memoir. I read this directly after the previous book - they couldn't have been more different. Loewen's view of Alaska was carefully reflected, steadied over many seasons - lonely but light, dark but still, desolate but beautiful - all those true dichotomies that we Alaskans know to be a love/hate struggle. "Alaska" the character could be felt in this book - it was a historical draw to Russians, an ongoing mystical place to Alaska Natives and it provided a present-day fishing bounty for the author's own young family. I don't know if outsiders would get the full picture, precisely because it's not "OMG bears and mountains!" but that is why I enjoyed it so much.

The Child Catchers by Kathryn Joyce.
Like so many other "driveway moments" I've had while listening to NPR's Fresh Air, I was intrigued by this author telling Terry Gross of the the scandals emerging from the international adoption world - "orphans" with parents still alive, kidnappings, black market children, birth mothers tricked or guilted into relinquishment, etc... and mostly perpetrated by ill-informed evangelical Christians in America. As a newly adoptive parent I felt this sense of apologetical duty that I must inform myself of these injustices, these happenings, in the chance that I ever needed to defend our choice! (My god, why do I put so much pressure on myself?) So I bought this book and read half of it before it completely and utterly depressed me to the point that my husband forbade - FORBADE - me from reading another page lest I grow any more anxious about this one dismal view of adoption in the world. I do not doubt that this is well researched journalism - but there isn't a me in this book (at least in the first half), and there isn't a "secular" view of adoption, only the extreme right-wing crazies who feel that it's their calling no matter what to care for orphans (even if moving to America isn't the best choice for them). Again, not a book to be reading as a brand new vulnerable, sleep-deprived, emotional parent.

Currently reading -

Unbroken by Lauren Hillenbrand - Hero story of a WWII pilot who survived a shot-down plane over the Atlantic from the author of Seabiscuit.

Maya's Notebook by Isabel Allende - A young woman's story from one of my favorite authors ever. Not sure what it's about yet, only 20 pages in.

Cooked by Michael Pollan - How cooking food makes us human, encourages family togetherness, meaningful interactions, healthier eating and yet, why less people cook in the modern world despite the cult of celebrity chefs and food programming, etc...

p.s. The new The National album is sort of disappointing. :( Sounds a lot like the previous albums but less... good. Thankfully, I'm really really enjoying the new Vampire Weekend album - SO GREAT. Especially this song and this song.