Trying to Rescue My Mind

To my astonishment I discover it has been well over a month since I posted anything in this blog.  I have missed writing more than a phrase at a time, as one does on Facebook - but Facebook is the perfect enabler for someone with the brand of  attention deficit disorder  I seem to have in a very serious way. My ADD  takes the form of being interested, nay fascinated, in way too many things.  I am spellbound by gardening, cooking, food, politics, the politics of food, birds, travel,  ecology, the emerging world of sustainability in all things we humans need and do, wildlife and its protection, literature, poetry, art, hiking, kayaking,  and many many more.  On Facebook I can flash from one to another of these subjects, read posts, write posts, click on links, "like" new and wonderful pages and websites - a bit of pollen here, a drop of nectar there, never taking the time to really absorb anything or read it to the end.  The Internet offered too much of this mode of communication and learning already, and then I fell into a social network.  Doom.

I'm not writing in my blogs, not reading other people's blogs (okay, I AM reading my niece Jessica's blog with lots of pictures - to keep up with her life with two small children, a three year old and a new baby - it's so wonderful and funny, I am addicted), not reading many articles in any deep or thorough way, fear I am going to lose the ability to write in complete sentences, let alone put them together into paragraphs. The saving grace is books, real ones, that I can hold in my hand and read as far away from the computer as I can get.(I fear the Kindle and its kind would be the last straws for me - so, no.)  Since my last post whining about having nothing  that I felt like reading, I have found reading matter to keep me occupied. One fabulous novel (probably more slanted towards female readers than male, though by no means "chick lit") by Dana Sachs, called If You Lived Here. was one of the best contemporary novels I have ever read. Everyone to whom I have recommended it agrees. Unfortunately I followed it with one of my favorite writer's latest book - Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag.  This is a brilliant book, but a deeply painful and disturbing one. I could not put it down, but this story of a marriage in shreds and flames left me shattered and bleeding.  The review to which I link is an accurate expression of my own thoughts and opinion on the book - so I think I'll leave it at that.

Currently I have embarked on a Ursula K. Le Guin reading binge, starting with a book of her essays called The Language of the Night, which led me into the first volume of one her young adult series, Gifts.  I hope to escape for a while from both this world of teabaggers and discord in which we are all living, as well as my own scattered and disordered world of interests and passions.  I will weed, rake leaves, turn compost and live vicariously for a while in another world.  If I can just stay off Facebook.

Reading Matters

I had a "page" on this blog that I called "Reading," but I consistently forgot to write there about what I was reading; and a few days ago while attempting to catch up on it I somehow managed to completely delete it.  Nobody looks at those Pages anyhow, so, I think I will just write in the blog itself when I feel like discussing what I am reading. Or, not reading. I'm currently having a very hard time settling into anything that really grabs me.  Wonder if others have those strange blank spells.? Nothing you pick up, no matter how great the reviews, or enticing the cover, grabs you and makes you want to turn the pages. It's kind of a Reader's Block, instead of Writer's Block. The book for our neighborhood book club, meeting tomorrow evening, is The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein, which I declined to read.  It is narrated by a charming and personable dog, and after Gail (who very seldom cries) finished the book in heaving sobs, I knew I was going to skip it.  Since childhood (remember Old Yeller?) I have avoided dog books - their sole purpose is to break the reader's heart.  Our own crazy little old dog's death is still too recent for me to risk waking up that pain. 

We recently found Sea of Troubles, in a new paperback reprint. It's one of Donna Leon's Venice mysteries that has been, mysteriously, unavailable for far too long, and I devoured it in a couple of nights.  There are two others that seem to be missing, and I'm hoping they're next in line to return.  If you love a good police procedural, captivating protagonists, great food, and exiting locations, Leon's series of books with Commissario Guido Brunetti will be right up your alley.  I have never been to Venice, but from these books I feel I know it, in its contemporary form at least.  It's clear from these novels that Italy has its share of the woes and tribulations of modern life, but the beauty of this ancient city also manages to shine through.  Many of the mysteries have to do with environmental problems, and political corruption, as well as immigration problems.  All things we are familiar with and think of as our own national difficulties.  But, after I finished with Sea of Troubles, I was right back into my lack of enthusiasm for anything I pick up to read.  I have things on hold with the library system, but lack of funding has forced them to seriously cut back on the number of copies they order, and it can take weeks and weeks to get a popular book.

So, while I wait for my holds on the latest titles by Jane Smiley, Anna Quindlen, Scott Turow, James Lee Burke, Sharon McCrumb, and others, I am desultorily picking at one unread volume or another off our shelves.  We are trying not to buy books right now, so it's the long hard wait, unless I lose control completely and find myself at the register at Bookworks with a stack of new books in my arms.   Anyone have any suggestions?

Remarkable Creatures

Neither prehistoric creatures nor strong-minded independent women are unusual or surprising to us in our current time period. But the remarkable creatures of the title of Tracy Chevalier's latest novel are just those two life forms: prehistoric marine animals and the fossil hunting women who first discover them. Remarkable Creatures is Chevalier's sixth published novel, although only the second one I have read. I loved Girl With a Pearl Earring, and can't imagine why I stopped reading her after that.This book gripped me from the first page, and didn't let go until I finished it several nights ago. Even Apolo Ohno and Lindsey Vonn couldn't tear me away from the spell of this story. For maybe the first time in my winter-Olympics-loving life, I watched the athletes with one eye from time to time, but my real attention was on Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot as they dug and toiled on the beach at Lyme Regis, then toiled even more fiercely to have their discoveries acknowledged by the "learned gentlemen" of their time. Their time being partly the Georgian Period and partly the Victorian, hardly good years for outspoken intelligent women. Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859, twelve years after Mary Anning died, but as Ruth Padel says in her enthusiastic review of the book in The Guardian:

New life is formed from extinction and death," wrote Darwin in 1838, in a private notebook. Some 20 years later, he based The Origin of Species on the fact that fossils document a continuum of life forms, demonstrating that millions of species died out as others took their place. A generation earlier, however, when Tracy Chevalier's rough-petticoated heroine was pulling out of cliffs in Lyme Regis the evidence that would go into this insight, nobody wanted to believe that God did not, as one of Chevalier's characters puts it, "plan out what He would do with all of the animals He created.

On the book's website the story is summarized quite briefly thus:

In 1810, a sister and brother uncover the fossilized skull of an unknown animal in the cliffs on the south coast of England. With its long snout and prominent teeth, it might be a crocodile – except that it has a huge, bulbous eye.


Remarkable Creatures is the story of Mary Anning, who has a talent for finding fossils, and whose discovery of ancient marine reptiles such as that ichthyosaur shakes the scientific community and leads to new ways of thinking about the creation of the world.


Working in an arena dominated by middle-class men, however, Mary finds herself out of step with her working-class background. In danger of being an outcast in her community, she takes solace in an unlikely friendship with Elizabeth Philpot, a prickly London spinster with her own passion for fossils.


The strong bond between Mary and Elizabeth sees them through struggles with poverty, rivalry and ostracism, as well as the physical dangers of their chosen obsession. It reminds us that friendship can outlast storms and landslides, anger and and jealousy.

So, yes, that's sort of a fossil version of the story, but if that was all I had to go on to entice me into reading it, I might not have done so. This summary doesn't give the reader any idea of the richness, the historical texture of the novel.  So many strands of what was happening in science, in religion, even in literature (Jane Austen is briefly an offstage character), are woven into the tapestry of this story, yet it remains vibrant and alive, never stuffy nor boring - as historical novels can often deteriorate into being. Chevalier's forté is taking historical events and characters, then using her own magic as a writer to put them into novels.The bones of her stories are factual, but the magic lies in the way the author can imagine the characters' interior life, motivations, emotions, interactions.Mary and Elizabeth are entirely real to me, I hated to say goodbye.  Spend some time exploring the book's website, a rich resource; read Padel's review linked to above, and see if this doesn't sound like maybe your next read.  I promise it will be an engrossing one. And I intend to put Chevalier's unread novels into my library queue at once.

His Feet Are On The Noble Path

Ah me! Despite the pile of library books waiting by the couch, I find myself unable to settle for reading any of them. The reason for this is that I recently finished The Godfather of Kathmandu, and am finding it hard to leave Krung Thep (the Thai name for what we farang call Bangkok) and Nepal,  for any less exotic locales, and Sonchai Jitpleecheep for any less endearing character.

  This novel is the fourth in John Burdett's series of mysteries set in Bangkok.  Burdett's protagonist is  Royal Thai police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, son of an American father and a Thai mother.  Sonchai is a devout Buddhist, he calls himself a monk manqué, and it is this aspect of the novels more than anything else that keeps me waiting for the next one.  These novels are gritty, to say the least, grisly is actually more accurate.  The strange thing is that they are also quite spiritual at the same time.  Sonchai's quest  to become ever more enlighted, to be a good person, making merit, living according to the teachings of Theravada Buddhism is not easy, living, as he does, in the midst of such astounding corruption and squalor, in a city awash in the sex and drug trades, a police force that aids and abets both undertakings,  Sonchai's efforts towards his spiritual goals are every bit as absorbing (possibly even more so)  as his efforts to solve the fantastically horrible crimes he is assigned by Col. Vikorn, at once his boss and nemesis.

It is the character of Sonchai that makes me love these books. John Burdett's own essay on how he came to write this Bangkok series explains a lot. It is clear that he has immersed himself in the life of the city about which he writes, and the philosophy of his main character.  Theravada Buddhism is an ancient study of human consciousness,"a radically honest and penetrating assessment of the human condition" which I find fascinating, even inviting.  Sonchai finds in it a way to cope with the moral ambiguity of much of his life, with the pain and suffering that surrounds him, with his own divided nature, being half Thai, half farang. The story in this book wanders around Asia, introduces way too many fantastical characters, and is, ultimately, quite farfetched.  Nonetheless, Sue Grafton's newest alphabetical mystery starring Kinsey Milhone in coastal California just isn't grabbing my soul by the neck and leaving me panting for more the way that Burdett's anguished detective always does.

Read more about Burdett and his books in this NYT article: John Burdett:  Detective writer at work in a seedy Bangkok district. (Photo from Photo Gallery at Burdett's website.)

What's In Your Piles?

This is something I used to do back in the AOL JournalLand days, when I had a good coterie of readers and, dare I say, virtual friends. I think I did this on The Bibliophiles, my book journal. It's a fun activity to do once in a while, see what interesting things we have in our various piles, how they change over time (or not). I just finished A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, and have some thoughts on it in my other blog, here. It's kind of a relief to turn to Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford as a less taxing read, the first book in my first pile. As it's winter and about my only outdoor activities are walking and hiking, my main offtime activity is reading - so there's quite a few piles around the house:

On the nightstand:

The Monster In The Box, Ruth Rendell
Alimentum; The Literature of Food, Issue 9
Owls and Other Fantasies, Mary Oliver
What We Eat When We Eat Alone, Deborah Madison/Patrick McFarlin
Wherever You Go, There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn
Deep Economy, Bill McKibben

By the couch:

Xeriscape Plant Guide, Denver Water
New Mexico Gardener's Guide, Judith Phillips
Native Texas Plants, Sally Wasowski
New Mexico Bird Finding Guide, NM Ornithological Society
Desert Wetlands, Niemeyer & Fleischner
Poems FromThe Cranes Two, Judith Roderick
The Quilts of Gee's Bend

And, worst - or best - of all, the pile of new books I've bought, or from the library, waiting to be read. I call this my "Reason to Keep Living" pile:

Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro
In The Kitchen, Monica Ali
Hardball, Sarah Paretsky
A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore
The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver
The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood. I started reading this one, before she came for an appearance at UNM, then set it aside when a flood of library books from my hold list showed up all at once. I will return to it when I get a library dry spell. (Cross-posted from WomenOn)

The Literature of Food

We had an early dinner at the Nob Hill Flying Star on New Year's Eve, fabulous bowls of matzo ball soup and a shared slice of falling up cake. The food was, as always, delicious, the soup just what a cold evening needed, the cake a perfect celebration for a year's beginning. But as much as I love Flying Star's food, I may love their magazine rack more. I have always been a magazine addict, and this rack turns me into a slavering junkie. I could spend hours browsing, many more dollars than the budget allows, if I were given my head in this situation. I rarely buy the expensive magazines that are my favorites, literary journals, environmental and political philosophizing, cooking magazines. But, while warming my tummy with bread and soup, I picked up the current issue of a journal (well, bookazine, I see it's called on the website) I've glanced at, longingly, on previous visits: Alimentum; The Literature of Food. This issue, Number 9, had as its centerpiece an interview with Deborah Madison. It cost an astounding ten bucks. I began to read the interview, but it's hard to read while eating soup, and I gave up. But I couldn't leave that unfinished interview, and really wanted to see what the rest of the issue had to offer. I bought the magazine.

After finishing A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book yesterday, I was too entirely exhausted (both intellectually and physically), depleted, devastated and shell-shocked to start reading another book, so I took Alimentum to bed with me. I'm sort of saving the Madison interview for desert, but I read several poems and short stories as appetizers and first course. So far I'm not really impressed by the literary level of the work, but I have a ways to go before a final decision. The website gives only short excerpts of the pieces, which I find irritating. I'd find an entire piece or two a lot more indicative of the work as a whole than these little bits and pieces. The artwork, however, is wonderful. I might subscribe to it for that alone.

Winter Reading

It's that deep waiting stillness that only comes before a storm. It's been dark and cloudy all day, with a chilly sunlight occasionally peeping through. The birds are ravenous - it's impossible to keep anything in the seed or the suet feeders; they are emptied as soon as I fill them. Most recently this afternoon I went out and liberally smeared the cottonwood's trunk with my favorite new find: bark butter. It's a product resembling peanut butter, and smelling strongly of peanuts too, but containing beef suet and corn as well as peanuts and peanut oil. I stir in some seed mix, then spread it on the tree bark, in much the same way you'd spread peanut butter on a sandwich. It has brought a whole new group of birds just outside the kitchen window: several different kinds of woodpeckers, chickadees, creepers, even a curvebilled thrasher shows up most days. I need to go out and do one more feeder refill before it's totally dark, or the crowd of finches, sparrows and doves that arrives at first light will be very angry with me. They know snow is on the way, and they're tanking up.

It has been truly cold in the Southwest, or at least here in New Mexico, through most of December. My sister and her family were planning on coming out for a Christmas visit, and they did actually pile into the car and set off across north central Texas, only to be stopped cold near Wichita Falls, by dangerously icy road conditions, which would only have gotten worse as they approached the Panhandle. Friends from Texas who were in Santa Fe for their winter vacation encountered the same conditions days later on their way back home. So, we're sitting tight for now, with a wonderful glut of very fat library books, and plenty of firewood. It's an embarras de richesse, for sure.

After a rocky beginning, I sped through John Irving's new opus, Last Night in Twisted River. (This is but one of a gazillion reviews, you could read them for as long as it takes to read the book. But the book is better reading.) The beginning put me off with a surplus of information about logging in the north woods of New Hampshire (of course New Hampshire, it's John Irving), a subject I care next to nothing about. But, I persisted, and soon fell into the narrative that began in the logging camps mid twentieth century, and carried me along, much like the river carries the logs, through fifty years of our less-than-glorious history. The protagonist is a writer, whose life and career clearly follow Irving's own history in many ways. The story is filled with most of Irving's familiar themes: New Hampshire, bears, Exeter, college teaching, strange sexual relationships, parentless children, father/son relationships, the constant knowledge that life is an accident waiting to happen. There is a wonderful new theme also running through the story, as we follow the writer's father's life and career from his beginnings as a logging camp mess cook to his final ownership of a gourmet restaurant in Brattleboro, Vt, we vicariously share Dominic's amazing repertoire of food categories, preparations, and menus. As one reviewer noted, it's not a book to read on an empty stomach. Or, I might add, when you have a houseful of holiday goodies that have been gifted upon you. If you have ever loved John Irving, and you have some time to curl up by a fire with a fleece throw and a cat or two, this book will keep you happy through some long winter afternoons.

Now I have started an even fatter book than Irving's, A.S. Byatt's new enormous novel, The Children's Book. I am a serious fan of Byatt's, not just the book that brought her a lot of attention some years back, Possession, but of her shorter novels and her wonderful short stories. I have loved her and her sister, Margaret Drabble, also a very literary writer, for many years now. We are all of an age, and I am very pleased that they have the stamina to continue writing books that will keep me reading well into my old age. It's too soon to say much about The Children's Book, (though it's already on the "Best of 2009" lists that are starting to appear) as I haven't gotten very far into it today. Time to make some soup, light a fire, settle in under the fleece and cats and start turning pages. Ahhhh, winter. And, Gail Godwin, Anne Tyler, Tracy Chevalier, and John Burdett all have new books!!