a new orientation

My  first trip to Kenya, I never knew where I was. I guess this often happens when you visit a new city, when you haven't walked or driven those streets, haven't seen that tree or billboard or building before. But this disorientation felt particular. There was a way of getting from one place to another that felt unfamiliar in a whole new way. On my first day there, we drove from Nairobi to a small Maasai village near the border of Tanzania, and the second half of the trip wasn't guided by a road that showed us the way forward. Our drivers made their own way (or, remembered the one from before) over dusty ground and through thorny acacia trees. Then, there it was: a building, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

I thought of that feeling of disorientation, then sudden arrival, as I read The Bright Continent. A book about a new way of looking at Africa, its author opens by using maps and orientation as an illustration for how we would journey together through this book and its stories. Expect a Google map of the continent and you'll miss the important landmarks that are really the way to get from A to B. Be guided by those on the ground, and you'll find your way.

This book is well-written and well-researched. And, as someone who is Nigerian and has lived in the West as well, the author is able to straddle the continental culture divide and pull you along with her to explore stories of people and organizations in Africa and help you see them in a new light. Her main point is that, if we look from a formality-bias -- expecting Africa to conform to formal institutions and ways of doing things in the West -- we will miss the informal and customary traditions and innovations that are helping communities and individuals thrive.

I found this book at a used bookstore earlier this fall, and oh how I needed it. It started taking me apart, in the smallest ways, and readied me to be completely disoriented when I arrive in Kenya in a little over a month. I like maps, I like plans, I formality. But, now, I'm a little more ready to look in new ways.

Friends -- this is it. My last book completed this year, my last blog post on books I've read in 2016. Phew.

***
(photo: Nairobi streets)

you almost forget to breathe

The day after my last day of work, I woke up too early and ran under a dull sky that hid the sun until I was done. I arrived back at my apartment by 8am, the sun shining now but not giving much warmth, with the entire day before me and few plans to fill it until the evening. I called my sister, cleaned my kitchen, showered.

Then, I picked up a book of short stories. I read slowly. I let my heart catch up.

The introduction spoke of stories as a form of art capable of putting a reader in touch with life's fleeting, inexorable rhythms. Good ones can move you somewhere beyond yourself. You almost forget to breathe. Even in these first few pages, I remembered why I love short stories (short forms of most writing, really) -- the intensity, the conciseness, the simple complexity -- and knew this would be a book full of characters and stories to disorient me from what life had been and turn me about. Ready, somehow, for the new one that's ahead.

This particular compilation, The Best American Short Stories of 2016, was edited by Junot Diaz, one of my favs. He curated a notably diverse group of authors to tell all kinds of stories. I liked nearly all of the stories, but I have to admit that the ones with female protagonists appealed to me the most. The women in these stories are vulnerable yet strong, recognizing that their fates are, in many ways, at the mercy of the men and societies around them, and yet not letting those seemingly predetermined stories be all that is said about them in the end. In one story, a young Bangladeshi woman with a history that is slowly revealed works in a garment factory and agrees to becoming one of three wives as a means of survival:

Jesmin sees marriage as a remedy. If you are a girl, you have many problems, but all of them can be fixed if you have a husband. In the factory, if Jamal puts you in ironing, which is the easiest job, or if he says, take a few extra minutes for lunch, you can finish after hours and get overtime, you can say, but my husband is waiting, and then you won't have to feel his breath like a spider on your shoulder later that night when the current goes out and you're still in the factory finishing up a sleeve. 

In another, a young Ojibwe girls is rescued by a white man (or, is is that she rescues herself?) from what is essentially slavery. She never speaks to the man, never tells him her name. He calls her Flower. To him, she is beautiful and sweet. But,

That he called her Flower made her uneasy. Girls were not named for flowers, as flowers died so quickly. Girls were named for deathless things--forms of light, forms of clouds, shapes of stars, that which appears and disappears like an island on the horizon. 

And my favorite, I think, about a young woman dealing with the aftermath of a miscarriage of a baby about which she felt indifferent, who finds home in a strangers home, and the desire to mother in the grief of losing what she thought she never wanted:

All of my senses opened in recognition. The mixed scent of newsprint and butter, the muted ticking of the modern cuckoo clock on the wall, the enamel tea kettle gleaming atop the immense stove, the marmalade still sharp in my mouth: home. Here it was. Or something like it. Something homelike. Heimlich. How would the Germans say it? Gemutlich. Touchingly, where the soul or spirit belongs.

What happens to each of these women might seem like what you would expect, and yet each finds a kind of freedom: power over her body, her name, her vocation. It is only in the small entries into the women's narrations, the open window through which we hear whispers of what's really going on, that we understand this. Stories like this can ready you for a new season, ready you to look beyond what you think you know, ready you to know nothing at all.

books i didn't finish

Here's the deal: I've written, or at least posted, about each book I've read this year. Ok, that's a lie, because I can think of two that I didn't write about, not because I didn't like them but because I got busy and moved on to the next one before I really thought about these two. (The Turner House and We Should All Be Feminists, for the record.)

But, there are a few books I started and never finished. When Goodreads sent me an email and had tallied the number of books and pages I've read this year, I realized I wasn't totally truthful, with Goodreads or with you (though I'm not sure you care). I read more than I say I did. There's a reason, however, for putting each of those books aside, and some of those reasons my be worth writing about.

Pulphead by Jeremiah John Sullivan. A book of essays, one or two of which I'd read in other publications or for classes I've taken. Most reference pop culture in some fun and also thoughtful way. I really liked the first half of the book - the essays I've read before, plus one on the Real World, which consumed a nice part of my late high school and early college years. But then I got bored, and realized, yet again, how difficult it is to write and edit a book of essays that can keep one's attention, even when the reader isn't always interested in the topic.

Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor. I know a lot of other readers, especially liberal Christian women my age or a little older, really liked this book. I gave it at least 50 pages and couldn't get into it. She didn't say anything new about relating to God, and many of the anecdotes or illustrations she used felt untrue or not very meaningful to me.

Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton. Oh, I have strong feelings about this. First, I should say I listened to it on Audible (which is a whole other post, possibly). The opening took my breath away - such beautiful writing. But then it just got heavier and heavier, all the things she shared about her life, in present tense (so immediate!), with no pull back into present day for reflection or to guide the reader through all the crap that happened. This is the problem with the genre of confessional memoir that's so popular these days - the underlying ideology that's taking hold is it's ok to be messed up! Wear it proud! I'm all for vulnerability, but only in my close circles, and with people who are committed to seeing me through it. Not for the sake of wearing our bruised skin always on the outside. What is the point of that -- so we can all celebrate that it's ok to be bruised? What about healing?

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff. This was supposed to have been a good one, I think it even won some awards. The writing was nice but the two main characters, a married couple, were too self-involved and I could feel it all going south. I can't do a cynical book about marriage at this point in my life.

I've got 15 days of the year left and two books I'm partway through -- some short stories and a book about Africa that I put aside and intend to finish real soon.

***
(photo: taylor taught me this)

to catch words one day

I want to catch words one day. I want to hold them
then blow gently,
watch them float
right out of my hands.

from Brown Girl Dreaming by Jaqueline Woodson

***
(photo: sunset at Griffith Park)

reading bad feminist

I know nothing about cars. When I take my car to the mechanic, they are speaking a foreign language. A mechanic asks what wrong with my car, and I stutter things like, "Well, there's a sound I try to drown out with my radio."... I don't want to be good at cars. Good feminists, I assume, are independent enough to address vehicular crises on their own; they are independent enough to care.

-Roxanne Gay, Bad Feminist

This is one confession in a list at the end of Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay. It made me laugh, the part about turning up the radio to cover up the sound. It also made me nod in agreement, the part about not caring, and yet wondering if I should (to be an independent woman, i.e. a good feminist).

And that's probably a good way to sum up the book. There was some laughing, some nodding. In the middle there was some skimming because I got a little impatient with some of the essays. (And, I'd chalk that up to an editing choice. Some of these sections felt like a bunch of blog posts plopped there, instead of a more thoughtfully edited collection of essays - some previous writing that was expanded or combined or re-written.) In the middle of said essays, I also started to wonder if the author had anything positive to say. Where was the joy or the positivity? It was just critique of one bad movie after another (the section was on culture, gender and race). But then I felt caught - maybe it's because there's not much joy to be found, not much positive to say when it comes to how African Americans and other minorities are represented in film. Ok, keep reading...  

What I appreciated most in this book was the author's flavor of vulnerability. She wasn't confessional, but she did reveal a lot about what makes her human. That made her critique more credible. She's telling us that she's not a perfect feminist, that she's nuanced and complex and that she fails. So when she calls out others for ways they, too, have failed their art or their brothers and sisters, I can swallow it. We can be imperfect, yes. And, let's all try to be better. Yes.

***
(photo: coffee, reading, of course)

literary, lately: travel edition

I have a love/hate relationship with professional conferences. Love: travel to new places, eating out on someone else's dime, staying in hotels (I love a clean bathroom, especially when I'm not the one cleaning it). Hate: spending all day in over-chilled rooms with no windows, uninspiring keynote speakers, networking (i.e. an introvert's hell).

I'm thinking about this because it's happening next week, I'm going to a new city, getting up in front of a lot of people to talk about writing (simultaneously my most exhilarating dream and worst nightmare), and hopefully getting lots of reading done on the flights there and back -- among other things. Here are a few links that are getting me excited about traveling, writing, reading and everything in between.

Listen to what makes your hair stand on end, your heart melt, and your eyes go wide, what stops you in your tracks and makes you want to live, wherever it comes from, and hope that your writing can do all those things for other people. A writing manifesto, in the form of ten tips. Maybe I'll scrap my presentation and just read this to the audience?

Airports are mini-civilizations, governed by their own rules and rituals. On bookstores in airports. My airport rules: a magazine from those ubiquitous bookstores, peanut m&m's and stretchy pants.

The National Book Award long list selections are being announced this week. I haven't even heard of most of the nonfiction books just announced. Looks like I have some reading to do. Maybe worth an airport book purchase?  Follow along if you're interested...

I go in phases with writing music. Right now, it's this song and every other one from the album. He's, like, the male T.S. I'll probably also be listening to this on my flights. (Don't judge.)

Can't wait to find myself here. (Quick stop over to see my sister!)

***
(photo: NYC skyline, before flight to Kenya)

an unread library

There's magic in being surrounded by books... Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.

- Austin Kleon, Steal Like at Artist

***
(photo: my library and messy bookstacks... only partially read)

friends, here are some books i read

Friends and books: two of my favorite things. I like to read with friends, about friends, talk about reading with friends. Today, as I play catch up on blogging books I've read, I see a theme and I'm going with it. These books reminded me of how good writing will sound to you like a friend's voice, how friendship will inspire our reading choices, how good friends will give good books, and how one of the most enduring stories we will tell is how we found our friends.

This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff

Well-known memoir by a widely-loved writer. I read it on the way to the writing conference I went to back in April because I knew he'd be speaking, and because I found it for five dollars at a used bookstore a few weeks before. The book was good. Here is my favorite quote: All my life I had recognized almost at a glance those who were meant to be my friends, and they have recognized me. Yes.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

About a week after my birthday, I came home to a mystery Amazon package on my doorstep. It looked like books. I got excited. In it was this book and another - both books I'd been wanting to read. They were sent by my sister. The woman gets me, even if she doesn't often understand me (which is probably the case a lot of the time because I can be crazy and text her a string of emojis that I expect her to interpret). That might be my new definition for friendship.

The book sat on my coffee table for two months until I decided I'd pack it for my trip to the east coast and Kenya. I started reading it in a Starbucks with my nephew. He wanted us to close our books and play cards, but I kept telling him to read another chapter so I could keep reading, too. It was good. Then I read it on the plane flying over the Atlantic, and in the van weaving in Nairobi traffic and struggling over the rocky, dusty roads that led to Maasai Mara. I read it while America was arguing with each other about why police were still killing black men and in between long looks out the window traveling around Kenya, trying to understand the country by what I could see.

I don't have the book with me (it is already lent out to a friend). If I did, I might give you a quote. Instead I will say that I loved her writing about Nigeria, and wondered what I could learn about writing about Kenya. I also loved her insights about Africans in America and how they relate to African Americans and to America in general, about what they love and what they find strange, about the ways that language and accent and hair and clothing and weight and food and love and the way air feels on skin all make moving to a different country so disorienting, and coming home, even after so many years, like encountering an old friend.

The Fire This Time edited by Jesmyn Ward

One thing I love about books of compiled stories or essays is that, if they are well-edited, reading them can feel like sitting around a table with some really smart friends. That's how this book felt. The writers invite us readers around their table to learn from them, to start a dialogue, to acknowledge our shared humanity. Each essay highlights the specific voice and experience of the writer, which makes the books feel like a collective, a community - a gathered group that, together, is something more than just the sum of its parts. My favorite themes were writing to remember and the emphasis on the physical experience of being black in America (and, really, our world).

I can't choose just one quote to share with you. Not one thought or sentiment would sum up what the book made me feel or think about. But I am still thinking about it, which is good, and I hope I will be for a while to come. Mostly, I hope what I read will stay with me and help me be a better friend to some very dear people in my life, and to people I have yet to meet.

***
(photo: books! though not the ones i read)

literary, lately: Kenya edition

I'm using the term "literary" loosely in the title of this post. Really, it's just an excuse to share some of the things that are helping me gear up for Kenya.

Issues are addressed institutionally, programatically. People are addressed in their story. Watching Poverty, Inc. and was especially moved by the portion about a family helping orphans by helping parents who might have been forced to give up their children. Love this quote about the person to person way of addressing poverty. (Streaming on Netflix!)

The mzungu who is cringing right now, reading this, afraid to be like all these others and yet who fears it might be inevitable. That was me, reading my friend's kick-ass essay on all the shades of foreigners in east Africa.

Remembering how books are a large part of what inspired me to go in the first place.

A Kenyan fav.

A friend posted a photo on facebook from our trip last year that made me look scarily similar to white savior barbie. Imagine a long skirt, Maasai jewelry, one young girl hold each of my hands. Been thinking about how photos are often too flat to convey all of what's true (there is more to what was happening that day then getting photo opps with children), but also how to act and see in a way that embodies true partnership and love.

Edited to add: I love their reading lists. (Fitting, since reading about the founder of PIH is what made me want go to Kenya in the first place.)

Be back in a few weeks with stories from Kenya.

***
(photo: morning safari ride at Lake Nakuru, summer 2015)

an occasional strike of soul

And what is Bodily Flesh but a house so lightly mortised as to permit an occasional strike of soul to flash through like summer lightning? ... What is Soul or Spirit but Mystery, a Glory Ship, that Rumour founded by tales such as mine -- Mad Mary Roff -- tales bringing not confirmation but bare continuance of hope... instructing humanity in its keenest question: But if a man die, shall he live again?

- from the title story of Spirit Seizures by Melissa Pritchard

(a slim book of strange, somber short stories. I loved every one of them.)

***
(photo: sparklers lighting up friends at the end of a wedding)

i want to give you something

For all sorts of mistakes are possible when you are dealing with Him. Long ago, before we were married, H. was haunted all one morning as she went about her work with the obscure sense of God (so to speak) 'at her elbow,' demanding her attention. And of course not being a perfected saint, she had the feeling that it would be a question, as it usually is, of some unrepented sin or tedious duty. At last she gave in -- I know how one pulls it off -- and faced Him. But the message was, 'I want to give you something,' and instantly she entered into joy.

-C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I could tell you a few different stories about this book: how I started reading it after looking for a different book but finding this one instead, how the text on the cover intrigued me. How I found the receipt still stuck inside, telling me I bought it in 2012 but not telling me why. How, halfway through reading, I shoved it into a canvas bag to take it with me to read at the pool over Memorial Day Weekend and found the bag minutes later on the counter where I left it, swimming in the pool of water from my water bottle leaking everywhere. Now its pages are crumpled and stained.

But here's what I will tell you instead: you don't have to have experienced the loss of a wife (or a husband or a child or a parent or a friend) to find Lewis asking questions you have at some point wondered about. Lewis's nonfiction writing is decidedly philosophical, apologetic, heady. But this book, taken from a few moleskine journals he wrote in during the weeks or months following his wife's death, is much more reflective and raw.

I found myself reading the first half as a kind of observer. It's much more focused on the experience of losing his wife. At some point, Lewis notes a shift in his experience where the fog of grief lifts and he's able to experience his wife's presence in a much more clear way. It's at this point where he starts asking questions about his experience of God. His idea of God, shattered by the experience of his wife's death, has to be shattered again and again, he says. We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand the least. He writes of being utterly mistaken as to the situation he is really in, and always understands God as being more generous, more loving, more present than the person thinks. The mistake is to think Him absent, inattentive, unwilling.

[On a writerly side note: I have heard so many times how good prose writing is built on the foundation of good sentences. I would always nod my head. Yes, intuitively that made sense. But Lewis's sentences are good. Their length, their feel, their shape lends a kind of subdued intensity.]

***
(photo: book on table, before the water incident)

literary, lately: june edition

Unlike fiction, nonfiction is not a genre. It's a headache. An explanation for why The Sixth Extinction was number one on a list of the top 100 books of English-language nonfiction (chronological, working backwards), this piece also forced me to look up the word vituperative and made me feel, once again, hopelessly under-read -- a feeling I am trying to make a joyful one (so many books to read, yay!).

In the end, the trials of their relationship are worth bearing, because Frog and Toad are most content when they're together. Loved reading more about these beloved stories, though the speculation that they were actually gay lovers felt disappointing and maybe unnecessary. These days, friendship is so easily confused for romance or cheapened by sex. I think the boundary lines of friendship are incredibly sheltering, not restrictive.

One day you will hear a physicist say we are all made from the bodies of dead stars, and it will feel as if you've known it all along. A powerhouse of a story, and short, which is good because you might hold your breath the whole way through.

Like the first man / I was cut so deep by heaven's knife. One of my favorite stories, in song form.

No words, just these photos. Kenya, I'm coming for you.

***
(photo: writing, the view from above)

i read this book of poems

"Coda" by Danielle Chapman
     from Delinquent Palaces

Beyond the speeches we're given to when young--
the crystal moon, the harlot moon, the moon
big as the sun elongating scrolls
of banisters on the skin of someone
else so young--beyond the still moon cut
from a royal purple sky we stare into
as into the pupil of a beautiful
machine--beyond our grand stupidities--
the urgency won't perish: to be known
in one's own person as crocuses are known
by sun, conceiving green to breathe it,
for ravishment by light, to grow
into the moment in our cells when we open
ourselves as a plant uncoils pistils
and become refulgent whether looked at or not.



When I was in high school, my best friend started dating a guy who wrote poetry. So she started writing poetry, too, and sent some of her poems to me. Then, she bought me a small journal with blank pages and encouraged me to write poems, too. I wrote some really bad ones and stored the journal away for a very long time.

Since then, I've read books of poetry and books about poetry and even took a class on poetry. I found the journal and read my own early poetry. My conclusion: I'm no poet. And though I still read poetry, I'm sure that half the time I'm missing what's meant to be noticed. But poetry is forgiving. Just keep reading it over and over, and soon things emerge that you didn't see at first. I think that's why I love it so much. Surprise and discovery will keep you going after something.

So, I read a book of poems and here is my favorite one. I keep reading it over and over, each time finding something new.

***

(photo: blue sky over Michigan, at writing conference where I bought and read this book)

literary, lately: may version

Irony (or sign?): I am at a coffee shop trying to write a cute little essay about my ambivalence regarding writing friendships. In walk friends from church, who encourage me to reach out to writer-poet acquaintance. Maybe I will share the essay someday soon. Maybe I will email said poet. Who knows.

In the meantime, some links:

Reading this article on men in book clubs. At first I took offense to the idea that these clubs choose only books by men and with male protagonists. Isn't part of the joy of literature, and responsibility of literary citizenship, the act of entering into another's experience through books? But it started to make sense to me when the author of the piece explained that "the monthly meetings provide a space to explore literary depictions of what it means to be a man" and give them a unique space to explore empathy. Ok, maybe I can get behind that.

New Girl Crush: film director and screenwriter Ava Duvernay after listening to this interview on the power of voice and the making of Selma. I loved their conversation, especially the part about how her own "gaze" (a term she uses a lot) led her to shape scenes in Selma in a particular way. If I'd been interviewing her, I'd follow up with questions about what it's like to follow her instinct when making a film, how she developed her own voice, and what her favorite books are (of course).

Procrastinating on some blog posts about books I've finished. I'm falling behind. It was inevitable. At the same time, feeling inspired/validated in my approach by this short piece on the new Bookmarked series, in which authors write about books that inspired them. (Personal narrative, not criticism or cliff notes.)

This song on repeat.

Last week, I gave my goddaughter some books for her birthday, including Frog and Toad - my favorite. At first she got distracted from the books by a small Hello Kitty bracelet, but then she picked up Frog and Toad, scooched onto my lap and asked me to read to her. Heart melted.

***

(photo: blurry palm trees and car lights somewhere along the 110, being sped home after writing conference)

give this book the attention it deserves

Sometimes, it's hard for me to separate my experience of a book from the circumstances of my life while reading it. If you've read any of my read2016 posts this year, you might have gathered that much already.

So here's the thing with Tinkers: I was prepared to really like it, but I got distracted. I read it when I was tired, I read it on the train, I read it at a coffee shop when I got interrupted by a good looking stranger who asked if he could sit with me and talk (and I said yes), I read it on a Sunday afternoon when I was determined to finish it so I could start another book before travel a few days later. The conditions were not ideal, especially considering the kind of book Tinkers is -- not much plot, sprawling poetic sentences attempting to describe ineffable feelings, strange switches in point of view and time and generation that can disorient the reader if she's not paying enough attention.

Still, I liked it. I dog-eared pages that I am now transcribing into a document of bright passages from books I read. Even as I do this, I find myself drawn in again by the beautiful language -- poetic, and also terribly precise and physical and surprising. I keep reading past the sentence I meant to transcribe, forgetting what's happening in that part of the story but just wanting to follow his trail of words.

One of my favorite passages comes early on:

There was also the ring in Howard Crosby’s ears, a ring that began at a distance and came closer, until it sat in his ears, then burrowed into them. His head thrummed as if it were a clapper in a bell. Cold hopped onto the tips of his toes and rode in the ripples of the ringing throughout his body until his teeth clattered and his knees faltered and he had to hug himself to keep from unraveling. This was his aura, a cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure. Howard had epilepsy. 

The sign of a good book (and perhaps the nerdiness of the person reading it) is that she will bring it up in a conversation with friends over drinks, which is what I did with this passage, with a doctor friend, because it was the most wonderful and felt description of disease in fiction that I think I've ever read. No technical jargon until the very end, when Harding names it: epilepsy. But before he gets there, he wants the reader to feel it as the character does.

I was tempted to make this post a long list of the passages I love, but I leave you with that one, and with the recommendation that if you read this book, give it the attention it deserves. Drink some coffee, take your time, and resist good looking strangers (but only for this book).

after reading ongoingness

What interested me was the kind of love to which the person dedicates herself for so long, she no longer remembers quite how it began.

          -Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness

***

(photo: selfie with niece)

the art of memoir

Here’s the thing: like a lot of people, I feel pretty ambivalent about memoirs, mostly because I’ve read some really mediocre ones. At their worst, it feels like the author is forcing me to sit through a therapy session with them, or as if I’m sitting across from an extroverted stranger with poor emotional boundaries at a coffee shop. He is just talking at me with no pause to insert myself into the conversation. Bordering on painful.

I’ve read a few good ones. I was surprised by Stephen King’s On Writing, which was fun and insightful and which I still remember parts of (telling, for me). More recently, Edwidge Danticant’s Oh Brother, I’m Dying placed her own current life as a writer and soon to be mother alongside the lives of her parents and uncle, who raised her in Haiti and then in America, giving readers a sense of what’s kept and passed along through blood and across oceans.

Let me get to it: I read The Art of Memoir (mostly on a friend’s recommendation) and really enjoyed it. Part critique (of memoirs the author has taught to aspiring writers for many years), part instruction, and part memoir (of course), the book felt like taking a master class with a good friend. I underlined a lot, but my biggest takeaway is this sense that writing about one’s own life is shaped by one's particular passions and way of moving through the world.

Here is a passage that brought it together for me:

… there begins to burble up onto the page what’s exclusively yours both as a writer and as a human being. If you trust the truth enough to keep unveiling yourself on the page – no matter how shameful those revelations may at first seem – the book will naturally structure itself to maximize what you’re best at. You’re best at it because it sits at the core of your passions.

Throughout the book, the author calls this "what's exclusively yours" talent, which is kind of her because implied is that we all have it. It just needs to be uncovered and refined – through hours spent writing, interrogating, remembering, revising. (I would add a few spiritual disciplines to this list, too, but that may be another post for another day.) 

Also implied is that, requiring a process that involves reexamining and “correcting the easy interpretation” in order to reach a version of truth worth sharing, writing may actually heal us. Which, in my opinion, makes the hard work of writing a good memoir a worthwhile pursuit.

***

(photo: magnetic poetry memoir with by my niece)

tenth of december: the swell and crash of a good short story

 From Tenth of December by George Saunders:

What a thing! To go from dying in your underwear in the snow to this! Warmth, colors, antlers on the walls, an old-time crank phone like you saw in silent movies. It was something. Every second was something. He hadn't died in his shorts by a pond in the snow. The kid wasn't dead. He'd killed no one. Ha! Somehow he'd got it all back. Everything was good now, everything was-- 

The woman reach down, touched his scar. 

Oh, wow, ouch, she said. You didn't do that out there, did you? 

At this he remembered that the brown spot was as much in his head as ever. 

Oh, Lord, there was still all that to go through. 

Did he still want it? Did he still want to live? 

Yes, yes, oh, God, yes, please.

The thing - or, I should say, one of the many things - I love about short stories is how intense they can be. All crammed into something to be read in one sitting. So you, the reader, get it all in thirty minutes or so - all that build up and then the thing that breaks open. It's like an afternoon spent in the ocean, wave after wave crashing over you. The best are the ones you don't see building so high, the ones that take your over your body and toss you about and then return you to the sandy ground again, maybe a little scraped up by the shells but the joy of it all was worth it.

That might sound like melodrama (we're talking about reading, I know), but the best short fiction gives me this kind of thrill. And I was kinda expecting it from Tenth of December by George Saunders because I kept hearing so much about it... Halfway through the book, I'd say half of the stories lifted me off my feet, but overall it was a pretty average day at the beach. (To be honest, his voice was annoying me, it felt too affected to me. Like Rachel McAdams in half of the movies she's acted in. Just tone it down a little bit.)

Yesterday, I sat down on my couch with book in hand, intending to finish it. I was coming off a weird, emotional week, one in which I'd been able to push through some of the hard situations thrown my way. But there was one that felt like a last straw, that internally somewhere I was deciding to give up on. These little choices can be insidious because you don't realize that each one is really a choice to stop living. I was choosing to let my heart get a little bit harder, which feels like protection but is actually a living death.

This is how I found myself when I started the last story in the collection. The premise is two stories that intersect, that of a young boy playing make believe outside in ten degree weather, and a middle aged man who has decided to end his life my freezing to death because of a brain tumor. Their stories are filled out with wonderfully particular details - you understand why this man might end his life - but then he makes a decision to save the life of the boy when he is threatened, a decision which, in the end, leads him to choose to live himself.

I've excerpted that section above, the one where he realizes he wants to live after all. It came in a perfect swell, one that lifted me out of myself and made me realize that I, too, wanted more than little death.

That's the thing about a good story, it can make you want to choose the bigness of life.

reading about earth 39,000 feet above it

I bought The Sixth Extinction on a whim. That morning, I had finished reading the staggering Far From the Madding Crowd, and though I usually like to sit for a while with a book finished before I choose a new one to read, I faced a six-hour plane ride from my sister's back to California (and that's not including time sitting at the gate). I couldn't let that time be wasted.

So, an hour or two before I was due at the airport, my sister and I drove through the rain to the quaint local bookshop we'd already been to once that weekend so I could choose a new book and not have to take a risk on the selection in my terminal. I looked at memoir, then at the new books table, asked the cashier about a book I especially wanted to read (they didn't have it), then found myself in the Science section, and there it was. I'd heard of the book and had some interest in reading it, and then, a few weeks ago, had seen the book selected as No. 1 Nonfiction Book on the Guardian. (It's not clear to me if this means it's their top choice, or if it's simply the first one they chose to feature.) Because I'm a sucker for reading list selections and the shiny gold Pulitzer Prize emblems (and, yes, because I'm a nerd), I decided to go for it.

I read a good chunk of the book on that flight home a few weeks ago, and slowly finished it over the days since. What I liked about The Sixth Extinction - and, as a medical science writer, what I appreciated about it - is that the author presents a complicated subject that has lots of subjective and controversial arguments surrounding it in a simple, accessible and relatively unbiased way. There is a narrative to it, the main character being the earth itself, and centuries of species the supporting cast, their appearances and disappearances adding to the central conflict. That conflict is support and survival. Humans are just another of these species, thankfully not the villain. They are all fighting time, catastrophe, decay.

But the thing about the book is this: for me, it might not be that memorable. I enjoyed it while I read it - it was lively, and Kolbert's language was concise, resourceful, beautiful - but I didn't find myself thinking about it much after I put the book down for the night, or on my drive to work the next morning. It didn't move me emotionally. It didn't get me to think differently or to wonder. (Though it did make me want to travel to the Great Coral Reef or the Amazon, so there's that.) I know this wouldn't have fit with her as a writer or what she was trying to do with her book, but I think what would have made me more emotionally engaged is more reflection - like, what does all this mean? Or at least, what does it mean to her? After reading the book, finding myself not emotionally involved in her topic, I'm not sure it means all that much to me.*


*I also understand that this is because I don't "believe" in science. Like, I don't think it has the final say. I think there's lots of room for mystery. So, it might not be the way she wrote the book. It might just not be my cup of tea.

(Readers - you may or may not have caught on that I've been writing posts about the books I read, a tiny effort of mine this year. Not a book review. More a response in words.)

of love in far from the madding crowd

(Excerpts from Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy)


Of love, as a spectacle Bathsheba had a fair knowledge; but of love subjectively she knew nothing.  (Chapter XIII)

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What a way [Gabriel] Oak had she thought, of enduring things. Boldwood, who seemed so much deeper and higher, and stronger in feeling than Gabriel, had not yet learnt any more than she herself the simple lesson which Oak showed a mastery of by every turn and look he gave -- that among the multitude of interests by which he was surrounded, those which affected his personal well-being were not the most absorbing and important in his eyes. Oak meditatively looked upon the horizon of circumstances without any special regard to his own standpoint in the midst. That was how she would wish to be.  (Chapter XLII)

:   :   :

[Bathsheba and Gabriel's] was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship -- camaraderie, usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between the sexes, because they associate not in their labours but in their pleasures merely. Where however happy circumstance permits its development the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death -- that love which many waters cannot quench, not the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.  (Chapter LV)