Review: Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

I read Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon in order to prepare to teach it this coming school year. Song of Solomon is the story of Macon Dead III, also known as “Milkman.” Milkman feels lost and disconnected, but he goes in search of his family’s history and in the process discovers himself.

I hardly know what to say about this book. It’s incredible in way few things I have ever read are. I loved the magical realism. I think a lot people find magical realism confusing perhaps because it doesn’t fully conform to fantasy, so you can’t really suspend your disbelief and just go with it, but it also doesn’t conform to realism, and sometimes events can happen that are hard to make sense of. This story is so perfectly layered and carefully written. It’s a masterwork in the art of writing. It’s not only one of the most beautifully poetic books I’ve ever read, but it’s also spiritually fulfilling and a captivating story as well.

One suggestion I have for anyone who reads this novel is not to miss Toni Morrison’s forward. When she reveals the care and thought that went behind just the first sentence, you will understand just how tightly written a work of genius this novel is. I appreciated the way that no thread was left abandoned. Every idea that was introduced was brought back. There was nothing “extra”; no details were just thrown away. As such, it requires quite a close read. Be careful though. I found errors in the online help sites SparkNotes and Shmoop that might cause a reader to be confused, especially if he/she makes the egregious mistake of reading the help sites alone instead of the novel.

I am so glad I read this book. I think I loved it even more than Beloved. This novel deals with some of the same themes as Beloved—the legacy of slavery that resulted in cycle of abandonment by black men and single parenthood and grief for black women. In another writer’s hands, exploration of these theme could go badly wrong. Morrison is an essential writer for our times. She could teach us so much about the ways in which the past still impacts us today and will impact us in the future.

Man. What an excellent book.

Rating: ★★★★★

This book is a bit contemporary for historical fiction, but I’m still counting it because the ending occurs at least ten years before it was published, and many of the events concern the past. Not everyone may agree with this categorization, but given the importance of the past in this book, I think it’s fair.

Review: Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. It is the story of a dying preacher, John Ames, who worries about leaving his young wife and son with no money (and in his son’s case, few memories of his father). The novel is written in the form of a letter from Rev. Ames to his son as a means for his son to understand and get to know his father.

At the outset, such a setup seems like it would be a depressing novel, but the result is actually more uplifting. Ames may be a minister well-versed in the gospel, but he is not holier-than-thou—in fact, he’s quite reflective about the ways in which he falls short, and he’s a rather open-minded philosopher. More than anything else, this book winds up being a sort of philosophical memoir. Ames recalls memories of his father and grandfather, both of whom were also ministers and who often clashed with each other. His grandfather was a abolitionist who was connected with John Brown in Kansas.

Obviously this book is well-regarded, and it has received a lot of praise. Though I did like it, I can’t really say I loved it, but I think part of the problem might be that I listened to it instead of read a print version. I think this book needs a slower digestion that is possible with print. Though the narrator, Tim Jerome, did a wonderful job telling the story, I think I missed some things as I listened to it. I can tell it’s well-written and spare in its elegance, but the story didn’t do as much for me as I wanted it to. I thought the prodigal son Jack Boughton was the most interesting character, and the way Ames wrestled with his conscience over Jack Boughton was the most memorable part of the book for me. In the right hands, I think this book could be a wonderful book. I’m just not sure it was really written for me.

Rating: ★★★½☆
Audio Rating: ★★★★½

 

Review: Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee

As I typed the title to this post, it occurred to me I never thought I would be reviewing another book by Harper Lee. And yet, here we have Go Set a Watchman. I have seen a lot of people I respect saying that they will not read this book because they are not sure what Harper Lee’s intentions are. She is 89 years old. She can’t hear well. And isn’t it suspicious, they say, that this novel came out after her great defender, Alice Finch Lee, whom Nelle (as she is known to friends) called “Atticus in a skirt,” died?

When I was at Kenyon College at the Writer’s Workshop for Teachers recently, I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Nick White, who read one of his short stories and participated in a Q&A with Nancy Zafris (whom I also had the distinct pleasure to meet). We were at a wine and hors d’oeuvres gathering, and Nick was trying to figure out how to spell hors d’oeuvres in a text to his mother, and I was no help because I had already had a couple of glasses of wine. I remarked to Nancy that I had moved up to Worcester, Massachusetts from Georgia about three years ago. She looked at me gravely and asked, “How is it?” I shrugged and said something about rednecks being the same everywhere. She agreed to that. Nick and I started talking about this new Harper Lee book. He said he was probably going to be a “terrible person” and read it, and I confessed I would, too, because I “can’t NOT read a new book by Harper Lee.” And Reader, despite the misgivings you might have, I would encourage you to read it, too. Yes, even if it tears down your idol.

You have probably read the spoilers. I think CNN (it might have been CNN—I don’t keep track anymore because the news is like so much background noise most of the time) was blaring “Atticus is a RACIST” every ten minutes yesterday. And maybe you also heard about Jem because that happened in the first chapter. Maybe it isn’t even necessary to sum up what happens in the book, but it is, in every way, as much a coming-of-age story as To Kill a Mockingbird. Do you remember in To Kill a Mockingbird when Jem is trying to explain people to Scout? He is categorizing people into different groups, and Scout doesn’t get it.

“Naw, Jem. I think that there is just one kind of folks. Folks.”

Jem turned and punched his pillow. When he settled back his face was cloudy. He was going in to one of his declines, and I grew wary. His brows came together; his mouth became a thin line. He was silent for a while.

“That is what I thought, too,” he said at last, “when I was your age. If there is just one kind of folks, why can’t they get along with each other? If they’re all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I am beginning to understand something. I think I’m beginning to understand why Boo Radley stayed shut up in the house all this time…it’s because he wants to stay inside.”

Readers tend to pay a lot more attention to Scout here because they want to think they agree with her, but it is Jem who has figured out something really profound. When Scout is upset in Go Set a Watchman, she says something almost exactly the same to her Uncle Jack: “I thought we were just people” (189). In the twenty years between the two books, Scout still believes. She is actually quite orthodox about it. So, when she comes back to Maycomb and she discovers that her illusions about her sleepy little town and the people in it are not reality, she feels as if she has been pulled out of the world. Nothing makes sense. She also seems to channel the reader when she rails at Atticus:

“I looked up to you, Atticus, like I never looked up to anybody in my life and never will again. If you had only given me some hint, if you had broken your word with me a couple of times, if you had been bad-tempered or impatient with me—if you had been a lesser man, maybe I could have taken what I saw you doing [attending a white supremacist meeting]. If once or twice you’d let me catch you doing something vile, then I would have understood yesterday.” (250)

A lot of us who read this book will feel the same way. We have held Atticus up as a paragon of virtue, a man ahead of his time. But what we failed to remember is that he is a man.

Scout’s Uncle Jack says, “now you, Miss, born with your own conscience, somewhere along the line fastened it like a barnacle to your father’s… You never saw him as a man with a man’s heart, and a man’s failings” (265). In a sense, Scout needed to come home and break with her father (after a fashion)—yes, even Atticus Finch—in order to be her own person.

The novel makes a profound statement about the failings and frailty of human beings. It has its own literary merit. It will suffer in comparison to To Kill a Mockingbird. After all, that’s one of the perfect novels, and this novel is an earlier draft. I will add that in my opinion, it’s a pretty excellent draft. It is easy to see how Lee’s editors saw the sparks of Lee’s novel in this one and encouraged her to write about Scout as a child. There is one hilarious scene when Jem, Dill, and Scout enact a tent revival in the yard, and there are several great scenes from Scout’s adolescence. Scout has not changed. She is as feisty as she always was. I think this book is, on the whole, a great read.

The book is not as poetic as TKAM, but it has its moments. It relies way too much on dialogue, particularly at the end. There are some parts that are a bit muddled and confusing in their wording and perhaps in their point, but as a whole, it hangs together well. Other reviewers have said it’s more complex than TKAM, and I would agree. It explores the complexity of human beings, particularly people we love (and especially people we love who hold abhorrent views). I do NOT think, as Michiko Kakutani said in her NY Times review, that this novel upends everything we thought we knew about Atticus Finch. Instead, the novel gives him some interesting and unsettling failings that nonetheless can be reconciled with what he did in the courtroom when he defended Tom Robinson (the fact that he is acquitted in this book, and it wasn’t changed to reconcile with the events of TKAM was a mistake, I think—and it shows this book had very little outside editing).

In terms of the controversy surrounding its publication, there is this to consider: this book was discovered, and it would have been published after Lee died without her blessing. It just would have. There is no way a discovery like that is made and people don’t want to bring it to light, either for good reasons or bad ones. Did Lee want the book to be published now? I don’t know. But either way, it would have happened. One way to think about it is this: publishing the book while Lee is still alive means she will at least reap some of the benefit from the sales. If it had been published after her death, none of it would have gone to Harper Lee at all. This new books has not diminished Lee’s achievement with TKAM, and it has brought interesting nuance to beloved characters we thought we knew.

I haven’t looked forward to a book’s release so much since the last Harry Potter book, and I can’t remember the last time there was so much discussion about a book. Perhaps some of my friends will think I’m bad for reading it, but like I told Nick White, there is just no way I can skip a Harper Lee book. I just can’t. I am really glad I read it. It has some interesting things to say about the complexities of the South, and as Mary Badham (who played Scout in the movie) said during a Q&A livestream I watched, this novel is interesting particularly in light of what we have experienced as a nation in the last year.

Rating: ★★★★★

I struggled over how to rate this because it’s impossible not to compare it to TKAM, so I asked myself, if it weren’t Harper Lee, what would you have rated it? I probably would have given it a 5 then. I do grade pretty easily, but I also can’t remember the last time I gulped a book in one sitting. Surely, that says something.

Review: March: Book Two, John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell

I read and reviewed the first volume of John Lewis’s civil rights graphic memoir March: Book One. It took me a little while to get around to reading Book Two, but I picked it up today.

March: Book Two picks up where Book One left off after successful sit-ins in Nashville. In this volume, Lewis becomes more involved with SNCC and becomes increasingly involved in the Civil Rights Movement. He describes participation in several protests, namely attempting to integrate a movie theater in Nashville and testing the Boynton v. Virginia Supreme Court decision through participation the Freedom Rides. He rises to Chairman of the SNCC and describes his role in the March on Washington. He also mentions the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham as a pivotal moment that convinced Kennedy he needed to act (of course, he was assassinated before the Civil Rights Act could be passed). The book ends as the 16th Street Baptist Church is bombed.

Graphic memoir is the perfect medium for telling this story. As much as I have read about it and heard about it and even seen some pictures, these drawings of the frequent violence convey the danger and menace in ways that other media cannot. Cameras could not always go the same places as the soldiers on the frontline of the Civil Rights Movement went, but their memories can be brought to life through this artistic medium.

As with the first volume, this volume flashes back and forth between Barack Obama’s inauguration and Lewis’s memories of the Civil Rights Movement. If anything, the device works even better in this volume. It easy to see how the experiences Lewis had in the 1960’s would have been on his mind as he watched America’s first African-American president be sworn into office.

As in the previous volume, this volume taught me some things I didn’t realize. I didn’t know that Lewis knew Stokely Carmichael. I guess I should have known they knew each other because Lewis has talked about being sent to Parchman Farm with the Freedom Riders, and Carmichael was sent there for the same reason. I guess we tend to compartmentalize and organize people who participated in the Movement without the understanding that at first, they were working side by side (at least a little bit). Carmichael succeeded Lewis as chairman of SNCC. Like I said, I didn’t put it together somehow. I am also a bit embarrassed to admit that though I knew Lewis was there at the March on Washington and at Selma, I didn’t realize he was a Freedom Rider. Lewis has said that he wanted to write his memoir in this way to share his remembrances of the Civil Rights Movement because he thought children would learn from it. Not that this book is just for children or could necessarily be considered a children’s book. However, I think Lewis was on to something with this idea. Here are some tweets with images of Lewis at the San Diego Comic Con, dressed in cosplay as himself—as he dressed for the Selma March.

 

Yes, I think Lewis gets it about the way to tell his story.

Review: Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

Despite being an English teacher for seventeen years (and English Education major), I have somehow not read Mrs. Dalloway until now. Frankly, I think I was daunted by how difficult I had heard it was. On the other hand, perhaps books come to us when we’re ready for them. Perhaps I hadn’t read Mrs. Dalloway until now because I didn’t need to. I’m not really even sure what made me suddenly pick it up a few days ago. True, I do plan to teach it in my AP class in the coming year (I have never taught AP before, and this book is often mentioned on the test and shows up as a recommended text for the course). But that is not the only reason. I have more books I need to read for that class, and I have more summer stretching before me to read. In fact, given I just returned from Ohio farm country, you might have thought I would choose something a bit more American to delve into (I’m doing A Thousand Acres in my AP course as well, and I could easily have found myself in the Cook family’s Iowan King Lear). I think I was just ready for this one.

If you’ve not read it and know nothing about it (which was NOT the case with me—I am English teacher/major enough to at least say I knew basically what it was about), Mrs. Dalloway is the story of a day in the life of the eponymous Clarissa Dalloway, who famously begins by deciding to get the flowers for her party herself. The book follows her thoughts as she embarks on this outing, and then flits from her thoughts to those of other characters, including Septimus Warren Smith and his wife Lucrezia, a shell-shocked WWI veteran struggling with mental illness and his homesick Italian wife, whom he married on a whim at the end of the war; Peter Walsh, Clarissa’s former suitor, whom she declined to marry; Clarissa’s husband Richard, the model of British reserve; Clarissa’s daughter Elizabeth, who feels constrained by her femininity and wants to be a farmer or a doctor; Miss Kilman, a lower-class educated woman who tutors Elizabeth, and who (it is implied) Elizabeth is in love with; and several other characters. It does require some concentration to follow, but it works as a device because of the connections between the characters. Clarissa Dalloway is throwing a party—she takes delight in throwing parties and bringing people together, though both her husband and Peter have difficulty understanding why parties are so important to her, and Peter disparages her as a perfect hostess. What is really at the forefront, however, is preoccupation with death. Clarissa Dalloway clearly feels afraid of the prospect of dying, and she worries about the choices she has made in her life, including marrying Richard. Her story is intertwined with Septimus Warren Smith’s, and at the end, her observation about Septimus’s death brings the two storylines together in a satisfying if someone ambiguous ending.

I don’t really know what to say about this book. It’s 90 years old, and given its prominence in literature, it’s been dissected ten ways to Sunday. I don’t really feel the need to dissect it (I will do that with my students!). The first thing I felt as I became immersed in the story is that I was in the presence of greatness. I don’t think I’ve read anything quite like this book. At the end, when I closed the book on the last page, I was in awe of Woolf’s mastery. She elevated the lives of people many of us would dismiss—namely, Clarissa and Septimus. It’s easy to view Clarissa from afar and see her as shallow, reserved, conservative—someone who squandered her life on silly parties and never felt deeply. But she feels things deeply. She is recovering from a vague illness (the sense that it was a mental illness becomes clear when we learn she was a patient of the evil Dr. Sir William Bradshaw, who announces Septimus’s death at Clarissa’s party). It’s also easy to dismiss Septimus as “crazy.” I found myself particularly drawn to his storyline because of the empathy which Woolf makes the reader feel. Septimus fought for English ideals in the war and came out damaged (he’s one of the first victims of shell shock in literature). The descriptions of the voices he hears and his hallucinations made me truly ache for him, but they were drawn so astutely that it is impossible to forget that Woolf herself suffered from mental illness and also succumbed to suicide.

I love books. I don’t often close books and think, I just finished a masterpiece. Often, I have to think about a book for a while and have a sense of it working on my psyche before I can tell it’s a masterpiece. I didn’t even have to finish this book completely before I already knew it was a masterpiece; I felt all the time I was reading it that Virginia Woolf was a genius. But once I finished it, all I could do is sit and think and be in awe of Virginia Woolf’s command of the English language (this book is really a gorgeous prose poem) and her understanding of the importance of all of our stories—all of us, every person, has a profound story, and there is beauty and mystery in the average day.

Rating: ★★★★★

I’m counting this as my Classic with a Person’s Name in the Title for the Back to the Classics Challenge. I’ve already done a London book for the Reading England Challenge, but it’s a pity because this is a quintessentially London novel. I had thought I’d read it later in the year and count it for my Bloomsbury group novel in the Literary Movement Reading Challenge, but given I’m teaching it in the coming year, I didn’t feel good about waiting until November to read it. (Boy, I’ve gone off the rails with that challenge.)

Review: Shadeland, Andrew Grace

I ordred Andrew Grace’s poetry collection Shadeland after reading his poem “Field Guide for How to Pioneer the Midwest” in the May/June 2015 issue of The Kenyon Review. What particularly struck me about that poem was the simple, relatively unadorned language that not only brought the American pioneer to life, but made him beautiful. It reminded me of stories I had heard. My ancestors living in a dugout in the Texas plains until they could build a house. My great-great-great grandmother crying when the wagon stopped for the night because she didn’t know how to do anything except have babies and look pretty. There is something about westward expansion and farming that that really captures the American spirit for me, so I was eager to delve into more of Andrew Grace’s poetry. His website describes the collection as follows:

Shadeland is not only the name of the Illinois farm on which poet Andrew Grace was raised, it is also that elusive space where language attempts to recover all that has been lost. Deeply concerned with the state of today’s rural spaces, Grace’s poems describe a landscape and a lifestyle that are both eroding.

Stylistically rangy, yet united by an ardent eye for intricate imagery, Shadeland features allusions and influences as classical as Homer, Virgil, and Hopkins while still exhibiting a poetic sensibility that is thoroughly contemporary. Employing a blend of baroque and innovative language, these 21st-century pastorals and anti-pastorals both celebrate and elegize the buckshot-peppered silos and instill cornfields that are quietly vanishing from the countryside.

I would definitely agree that the collection is stylistically rangy. Of the poems I liked best, I found myself responding most to the ones that were more like “Field Guide for How to Pioneer the Midwest.” I loved the simple “Pilgrim Sonnet,” which evoked the call to settle the west and elevated it to religious pilgrimage. I’m not so sure it really wasn’t, after reading this poem. I also liked the six-part ekphrastic poem “Dinner for Threshers” inspired by the Grant Wood painting. Possibly my favorite poem was “Z,” which captures with beautiful simplicity the death of the speaker’s father in a farming accident and connects it to “the wind from Illinois” that has shaped and destroyed. It’s really a gorgeous poem. I also really liked “The Outermost Shrine of the Narrowest Road,” “Of Love and Wild Dogs,” “Is to Say,” and “For Tityrus,” all of which I felt were beautifully direct in their language. I think after reading Roger Rosenblatt, I’m noticing the nouns and verbs and the ways in which modifiers detract rather than add. I did try re-writing “Of Love and Wild Dogs” without modifiers in my writing journal, and it has a stark effect, stripping the language in that way. It is something I think I will experiment with in my own writing—drafting it as it comes and then revising to strip the modifiers.

I found this article about Shadeland, which is the family farm that gives its name to this collection. It sounds like quite a place, and I can see why it inspired Andrew Grace. He somehow managed to capture so much about farming in America in this collection, from the promise of early settlers to the ever-shrinking endangered family farm. People have a complicated relationship with the earth, and nowhere does that seem more apparent to me than in farming, which has been a metaphor for the human struggle since Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden.

I had more or less forgotten how much I like poetry until going to the Kenyon Writer’s Workshop for Teachers, and now I find myself seeking it out and wondering how I could have set it aside. Andrew Grace’s collection Shadeland was a nice re-introduction.

Rating: ★★★★☆

Review: Unless it Moves the Human Heart, Roger Rosenblatt

I picked up Roger Rosenblatt’s Unless it Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing based on a recommendation from Marsha McGregor, a teaching fellow at the Kenyon Writer’s Workshop for Teachers in which I participated last week. It’s a tough book to categorize: it’s part memoir, part writing advice, and part model for teaching writing to others. It takes the unusual form of conversation as it tracks a particular writing class’s progress.

Rosenblatt explains in his preface that the book is “fiction, top to bottom” but is based on the real problems and subjects his class discussed. It’s admittedly a somewhat quirky format for a book of this type. As such, it will not appeal to all writers seeking advice (or all writing teachers seeking advice, and certainly not to people looking for a memoir). Rather than offering nuggets of wisdom in the form of bulleted lists or bold headings, Rosenblatt’s understanding of what it means to write and to teach writing is buried within the narrative about one class. As such, it invites careful reading, and I found myself reading some pages over and highlighting often. Even so, it’s a quick, conversational read.

I pulled a few ideas for lessons from its pages. I loved the discussion he shared of James Joyce’s short story “Clay,” which I also stopped to read before continuing with that part of Rosenblatt’s book. He has a another idea for students to create their own anthologies—not of their own work, but of poems they like and want to group together. As Rosenblatt says, “By the end of the course they have created a little book that speaks for their taste” (67). The book has many excellent reading recommendations (a book that added to my TBR pile—just what I need!). In particular, Rosenblatt shares models he uses for teaching personal essays as well as types of personal essays he assigns. His descriptions of class discussions are great models for lessons.

As I write all of this, I wonder if I shouldn’t have reviewed this book on my education blog, whose audience might more be the audience for this book, but I’m not entirely sure. I think anyone who writes might benefit from reading it. As I said, the time investment isn’t great—the book is only about 150 pages—and the dividends are worth it.

Rating: ★★★★★

Review: All the Bright Places, Jennifer Niven, narrated by Kirby Heyborne and Ariadne Meyers

I decided that I would listen to All the Bright Places after I finished We Were Liars, which was also read by Ariadne Meyers. She’s a really good interpreter for YA.

First all, if you read or listen to this book, be prepared to cry. Maybe especially if you listen to it, because Ariadne Meyers will make you cry at the end, and if she doesn’t, then Jennifer Niven will in her author’s note.

All the Bright Places is the story of Violet and Finch, who meet in the most improbable place: the bell tower at their high school. Both of them are contemplating suicide. Violet has sunk into depression after losing her sister in a car accident, while Finch’s problems are a bit more complicated—he has bipolar disorder, a disinterested family, an abusive father, and is bullied at school. Somehow, it’s not exactly clear who saves who, as the book’s description says, but soon they become friends and then something more as they work on a school assignment to explore the attractions of their home state of Indiana.

This is a great book, and the narration is particularly good. You are going to like it if you liked books like The Fault in Our Stars and Eleanor & Park. In fact, I’ve seen some reviews that insinuate that this book is a bit derivative of similar books that preceded it. First of all, I don’t think that’s the case. The stories all deal with similar themes, but ultimately, this book is Jennifer Niven’s story. I felt her characters were very real and recognizable in some ways that perhaps John Green’s aren’t. I feel his characters are often a bit too precocious and quirky, whereas I feel I have known teenagers who are more like Violet and Finch.

The narration is great, the story is great (give it a chance; the comparisons to other YA books are inevitable, but I really think this one stands on its own), and it’s not a topic that is dealt with a lot in YA. If you’re a teacher, get a copy for your classroom library; it will not be on your shelves very often.

Rating: ★★★★★
Audio Rating: ★★★★★

Some spoiler-y parts to follow, so fair warning. If you keep reading, it will help you understand how this book moved from four to five stars for me right at the end, but my assumption is that if you keep reading, then you are prepared to be spoiled because you either have already read this book and WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE FEELINGS or you don’t mind spoilers. You can still turn back if you are not sure.

 

Spoiler alert!

I had figured out that Theodore Finch was going to commit suicide well before he did. I mean, why else include the Help Line and Resource Guide, right? Plus, Finch is obsessed with suicide. He has researched the suicide methods of several famous people and recites them for the reader, and he actively tries to commit suicide at least once before he actually does. Then, he starts getting rid of his belongings and withdraws completely from everyone, even Violet. So I wasn’t surprised when he did it, and my eyes stayed pretty dry until the end when Ariadne Meyers read the last chapters when Violet found the note that Finch left her in one of the places they had planned to visit. Still, just a few sniffles really because, you know, fiction. I know, I know. I can bawl my eyes out knowing Catherine is going to die at the end of A Farewell to Arms (a book from which, aptly, Niven draws a line for her introduction), and I can’t shed a tear for Theodore Finch? Well, like Violet, I guess I was mad at him for not getting help (even though I knew he wouldn’t). I was furious with his parents for not caring enough for him to notice he was in real trouble. I don’t really know how I felt. However, Jennifer Niven explained that this book came from her own story in her author’s note. Her great-grandfather committed suicide, which was an event that left ripples through her family even to the present day.

The same thing happened in my family. My great-grandfather, Omar Gearhart, committed suicide on December 29, 1930. He had been battling some major problems, and I’m not clear what they were, except that later, my grandfather described his father as “crazy,” and his younger brother recalled hiding under the porch from my great-grandfather. There is a lot that I do not know. I know some of his children were taken away from the family and were adopted by other families before he died. I know that my grandfather was one of them. I know also that the children were told their father was murdered, which is something my grandfather’s sisters both confirmed. I guess somehow their mother thought it would be easier to hear, though I confess I’m not sure why, because then the children grew up thinking that their father had been murdered and nothing was ever done about it. I didn’t think that sounded right. More and more, I wondered if the official story was true, so I sent away for my great-grandfather’s death certificate—a matter of public record. And it said he died of a gunshot wound to the head, self-inflicted. Contributing cause was “despondency.” And still, to this day, I had family members whose first reaction when I told them was shame and secrecy.

People, shame and secrecy is not how we prevent suicide. It’s how we perpetuate the problem. We say that having a mental illness is something to be embarrassed about, hidden. Finch says, “Labels like ‘bipolar’ say This is why you are the way you are. This is who you are. They explain people away as illnesses.” He, too, is reluctant to connect himself with this label. Even though I didn’t know the truth about my great-grandfather until recently, his death did ripple across the generations.

Niven also shares the other personal connection she had to this story: she loved a boy when she was a teenager, and that boy committed suicide. And Jennifer found him. How devastating. I think, but I’m not sure, that my great-grandmother found my great-grandfather. My dad says he remembers her. He remembers visiting her. He told me that even when she smiled, she seemed sad. She lost several of her children for reasons I will probably never know, though she was allowed to visit them, and she lost her husband. She had a very sad life. And she was beautiful.

Omar Gearhart, Gertrude Perkins & John Douglas Gearhart
My great-grandfather Omar Gearhart, great-grandmother Gertrude Perkins Gearhart, and great -uncle John Douglas Gearhart, circa 1912

So, I don’t know, that personal connection somehow added a star to the book. I think books are sometimes mirrors for us, and I could see my own story in that book, in some way.

Spoiler over.

 

Sunday Post #23: Walden

Sunday PostI finished reading Walden this afternoon. I had no idea it was going to be such a demanding read. I had only ever read excerpts of it (turns out, those would be the “good parts” versions). While I do completely get its importance in American literature, I can’t exactly say I liked it. I liked parts of it. I didn’t see the connections between the various chapters very well (and sometimes not even within the chapters themselves). It seemed a bit meandering. I know some criticize Thoreau because he was actually not that far from town, and he was fairly social (rather than living off on his own). I think he makes it relatively clear that he was not literally living a solitary life. I think was he was really after was trying to live as simply as he could. How much time he actually spent in the cabin he built, I don’t really know, but it’s clear he spent a lot of time there, and he seems to be actively trying on the clothes of hermit, even if he’s not really one. But I don’t really care about that, anyway. Some really interesting nuggets throughout, but as a whole, it didn’t do it for me.

More irritating was trying to work the annotations in the Kindle version I bought. You’d think the notes would be in order (for instance, that note 73 would have followed note 72 in a given chapter). You would be wrong. That made it a real pain when I was trying to read notes that I had difficulty opening because they were either close to the edges of the Kindle page (and thus, all I could succeed in doing was turning the page) or when the hyperlinked text was only a small number, which even my small fingers couldn’t seem to touch in order to activate the link. It was really frustrating. I am sure the index is quite good, but it’s in the back before the notes and not so easy to navigate. Perhaps it’s not necessary given the search feature in Kindle. And finally, I found a bunch of notes on the text that were never hyperlinked. Who knew those were even there? Also, some of the text was oddly laid down (half a word might be half a line beneath the other half). I don’t know how that happens. I don’t know if reading the paper version would be as frustrating or not.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

So, on to other things. I have not added any books to my TBR pile, which is probably a good thing given how slowly I’m reading the ones in my currently-reading pile. I spent three days this last week at a conference, and I am going to another one this coming Saturday. I am hoping I’ll have time to write my usual blog post here next Sunday, but we will see what happens.

I am about an hour and a half from finishing All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven. I might try to finish that one today, either making soap or doing dishes. Or both. Who knows. If I do finish it today, my review will likely appear on this blog tomorrow. I don’t really like to post more than once a day.

So, what are you reading?

I am counting Walden as my Nonfiction Classic for the Back to the Classics Challenge. Just for my own reference, I’m making note of my progress on this challenge so far:

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It’s a chance to share news, recap the past week on your blog, and showcase books and things we have received. See rules here: Sunday Post Meme.

Review: We Were Liars, E. Lockhart, narrated by Ariadne Meyers

Wow. I’m going to try not to spoil anything for you because the less you really know about E. Lockhart’s We Were Liars going in, the more you are likely to enjoy it. Having said that, I know a little taste of the book is sometimes necessary for readers who might be on the fence about reading a book. Here goes.

Cadence Sinclair Eastman, known as Cady, is the granddaughter of the wealthy and WASPish Harris and Tipper Sinclair, who own a private island near Martha’s Vineyard complete with a full staff, a large manor house where Harris and Tipper live, and three houses for each of Harris and Tipper’s daughters: Carrie, Bess, and Penny. Carrie is the oldest and has two sons: Johnny and Will. They live in New York City. Bess, the middle daughter, lives in Cambridge with her four children: Mirren, twins Liberty and Bonnie, and Taft. The youngest daughter, Penny, is Cady’s mother. They live in Burlington, Vermont. Each summer the family gathers to spend their vacation on the private island, known as Beechwood Island.

We Are Sinclairs

Cady can’t remember much about the year fifteen summer due to an accident she had, and a shroud of secrecy surrounds the story. Her family does not speak to her about it. Cady is desperate to return to Beechwood Island and see her two cousins Johnny and Mirren along with Gat, nephew of the man Cady’s Aunt Carrie is living with. Gat has been visiting Beechwood Island as a guest of the Sinclairs for years, and over time, Cady has fallen in love with him. Together, they were the Liars, and they forged a close summer friendship that waned as they returned to home and school each year, but picked up right where it left off the following summer. But even the Liars are strangely silent and reluctant to talk about Cady’s accident.

I anticipate that some readers will have difficulty identifying with the privileged Sinclairs and their idyllic summers on their own private island. I admit it’s a barrier, but if you take a peek at the family dynamic, it’s a great deal easier to feel empathy for the family. They have a secretive, fractured family. One of my favorite aspects of the novel was its connection to King Lear and an assortment of fairy tales. In fact, I’m wondering if this book might not be a good one to bring into my AP Literature class, which will be reading both King Lear and Jane Smiley’s modern adaptation A Thousand Acres. I could see a small literature circle group really enjoying the connections between this novel and the other texts.

I understand that some readers don’t like the writer’s style. I listened to the audio book, and the narrator naturally had a great deal of influence over how the text was interpreted, so I can’t speak to those complaints except to say that if the style is bothering you, you might try listening to the book instead. I don’t think I have ever finished an audio book in one day before. I just wanted to find out what would happen. The suspense of not knowing what was going on with Cady’s family or her accident kept me up late until I finished the book some time after 1:00 A. M. Saturday night.

Silence

This was a perfect start-of-summer read, even if the story is a tough one. While it is YA, I would classify it as more mature YA—for high schoolers rather than middle schoolers, but it’s definitely appropriate for students in high school, whom I would imagine would really love it. I know this is the kind of book I would have inhaled had it existed when I was in high school.

Ariadne Meyers’s narration is perfect for the story. She emotes when necessary, and she pulls the cynical teenager when it’s called for. I liked her reading so much that I downloaded another book that I’ve been wanting to read that she also narrates through Audible.

Rating: ★★★★★
Audio Rating: ★★★★★