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I tried (and failed) to limit my list to ten. Click on the link to go to the full blog post.

1. Absalom, Absalom, by William Faulkner

This astounding novel is the story of Thomas Sutpen, a man who came out of the West Virginia mountains with nothing to his name, arriving in Yoknapatawpha County in 1833 to build a fortune and carve out a plantation, expecting to found a dynasty. We learn about him indirectly, through the stories that are told to young Quentin Compson. Re-reading it now I admired the structure of the book.

2. Memory's Wake, by Derek Owens

In this extraordinary memoir, Owens delves into his mother's past, into the childhood memories that suddenly began to surface when his mother is in her fifties. While properly skeptical and examining the controversy around recovered memories, Owens comes to believe in the terrible abuse his mother, Judy, suffered at the hands of her mother. This woman, deserted by her husband and left with a detested five-year-old, takes out her frustrations on the child. Confronted later by Owens's father, she does not deny any of it. This powerful book deserves a wide audience. It is one I will never forget.

3. The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings by Lillian Smith, Edited by Michelle Cliff

Lillian Smith (1897-1966) was a writer of extraordinary power and an activist who refused the roles pushed on women of her time. This collection of magazine articles, speeches, and letters from 1942 to her death speak directly to today. I have rarely read a more cogent diagnosis of where we have gone astray here in the U.S.

4. The Narrow Road to the Interior, by Kimiko Hahn

I read this deeply moving book three times and interpreted much of it differently each time. Hahn uses two Japanese forms for the poems in this book: tanka and zuihitsu. Most poets are familiar with tanka, though here Hahn presents them as a single line. Zuihitsu has no Western equivalent. It has been translated as &#8#8220;following the brush” or “stray notes expressing random thoughts”. Here the fragmentary nature and the energy of the work provide a particularly rich experience.

5. The Tale of Murasaki, by Liza Dalby

Very little is known about Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji. Genji, completed probably in 1021, is often considered to be the first novel. This fictionalized biography is almost a case study in how to write historical fiction. With this book I truly felt as though I was entering a different world every time I picked it up. Dalby has provided an exquisitely detailed view of life in the early 11th century.

6. Eventide, by Kent Haruf

The book starts slowly, gently. The aging McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond, come up from the horse barn and wipe their feet before going in for a breakfast prepared by Victoria, a nineteen-year-old single mom they'd taken in a few years earlier. I treasured each chapter, each page. I was touched, recognising again the generosity most people demonstrate toward those around them, how gentle they can be with each other. This is a story about how we connect with each other and how painful it is when those connections are severed.

7. New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families, by Colm Tóibín

When the title of this book was mentioned last week, the audience laughed uneasily, and Tóibín drily agreed that it was not the best marketing ploy. I, however, thinking immediately of Adrienne Rich's motherless children and my own struggles to wrench free of controlling parents, wanted to purchase it on the basis of the title alone. Luckily I enjoyed the entire book. For me, these essays accomplished the highest purposes of such writing: they made me want to reread authors whose work I know well; they pushed me to explore the work of authors new to me; and they gave me insights that I can use in my own work.

8. The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

I read this book twice, the first time for my book club. Tony Webster, retired, divorced, content with his unremarkable life, thinks back over his personal history, recounting episodes as he has always understood them. Then, the re-emergence of two friends from his past throws his understanding of those episodes into question. I actually enjoyed my second reading even more, going more slowly, seeing how each detail fit neatly into the whole. What a gem of a book!

9. Nothing to Be Frightened Of, by Julian Barnes

It's not a promising premise for a book: one man's fear of death. Yet Barnes' wit and learning kept me turning pages, nodding and chuckling.

10. Divisidero, by Michael Ondaatje

In this story of two sisters, Anna and Claire, what I find myself returning to again and again is Anna's quixotic effort to capture and preserve the past of a nearly-forgotten poet, Lucien Segura. A single life is short and buried in the flood of all the lives that come after and around it. You devote your life to accruing knowledge and experience. You expend considerable effort in shaping it into a coherent whole, and then you die and all of that is gone and no one really knows what it was like to be you.

11. Purity of Blood, by Arturo Pérez- Reverte

The Captain Alatriste series at first seemed to me a departure from Pérez- Reverte's other novels. These swashbuckling adventures about a hard-bitten swordsman during the Thirty Years War in the 17th century are narrated by íñigo Balboa—only thirteen in this story—who has been plucked from the streets of Madrid by Alatriste. The Captain may not say very much, but when danger looms, he is quick to pull his dagger and wrap his cloak around his arm. Although accustomed to killing, Alatriste has his own code. He is another Shane, a Jack Reacher, though perhaps with a harder heart.

12. The Cazalet Chronicle, by Elizabeth Jane Howard

These four books follow the members of a large family and their servants in and around the Home Place where William and Kitty collect their grown sons and their families during the summer holidays. This is not a costume drama but a psychological one. So completely is each person realised that I found myself absorbed by even the most commonplace worries. A delightful read.

We meet Maisie Dobbs as she steps out of the Warren Street tube station, a woman in a navy blue jacket and skirt, with “a way of walking, with her shoulders back and head held high”. It is 1929, ten years after the end of the Great War, but London and all of England have not recovered, indeed perhaps have never entirely recovered. For the British Empire as whole “908,371 ‘soldiers' [were] killed in action, died of wounds, died as prisoners of war and were missing in action from 4 August 1914 to 31 December 1920.” Of these 702,410 were from the British Isles while the rest were from its colonies.Ref

Even ten years later many survivors require medical and psychiatric care. They struggle to find a place in a society rocked by changes in the long-standing social order and staggered by widespread unemployment and shortages. Men who came back from the trenches cannot talk about their experiences. They carry their wounds, visible and invisible, as they try to adjust to a world that wants to forget the war.

Maisie herself walks between worlds. The daughter of a costermonger and a former maid, she nursed at the front before graduating from Girton College. As the story begins she is opening her own business as a personal investigator. Her first case, following a woman whose husband suspects that she is unfaithful to him, instead takes her to a cemetery whose war dead lead her into memories of the war and darkness set in the midst of England's green fields.

I'm grateful to have been reminded of this series. I investigated when this first book came out in 2003 and always meant to get back to it. I enjoy Maisie a lot. She's smart and practical, cool and caring. Her loyal and efficient nature has attracted lifelong friends and mentors. Even her name is perfect: Dodds reflects her humble background and Maisie is a perfect period name.

One of the things I like about this series is that Maisie's adventures force her to look into herself. Through the series we get to follow the trajectory of one woman coming to terms with the events of her tumultuous times. I like the psychological element that spices the mystery.

I hadn't read this book since my teens. Then, I enjoyed it so much I went on to read her poems, diaries and letters. Anne Morrow Lindbergh became the core of one of my first extra-curricular reading projects. For a long time they centered on authors, where I would read the author's entire oeuvre, one or two biographies, and some critical writing. I went on to projects about some particular interest of mine, like World War I poetry and journals, Canadian literary theory, and English ritual traditions.

During a two-week vacation on an island, Lindbergh walks the beach, collects shells, and considers the trajectory of her life. She values being on the island not only because it separates her from the world's demands, but because the simplicity of its way of life enables her to examine each item in isolation, a single shell on a plain wooden table, not buried in the jumble of possessions back home. She also describes such vacations as “Islands in time . . . The past and future are cut off; only the present remains.” I hear the echo of Rousseau's island idyll.

Gift from the Sea is a short book, exploring “my own particular pattern of living, my own individual balance of life, work, and human relationships.” This is an ongoing concern of mine, and I expect of most people. My life constantly falls off-balance, work taking over for a few weeks, or too many social engagements leaving me cranky and needing some alone-time. A few tweaks can put it right if I catch it in time.

Each chapter uses the image of a particular shell—moon shell, double-sunrise, etc.—to focus her thoughts and also, almost imperceptibly, making it seem as though you are walking along a beach with her, casually chatting. And for those of you who have been to my home, no, I started obsessing about shells long before reading this book.

Rereading favorite books can be a dangerous activity. Some of it does seem like a time capsule to me, in terms of society and myself. Men's and women's roles have changed since 1955, when the book was first written, though much remains the same. I, too, am not the same person I was so many decades ago, when most of the sentences I underlined had to with love and marriage.

Also, much of it has become embedded within our collective consciousness, such as her call to simplify our lives, revolutionary in the 1950s, or her discussion of the importance of finding our own inner stillness. I found familiar sentences here that I'd forgotten came from her. I also found sentences that resonate for me now that I am older, such as “Perhaps middle age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.” I like her appreciation of the oyster shell, “humble and awkward and ugly” but admirable for “its tireless adaptability and tenacity”. I laughed at her use of Zerrissenheit, which William James described as “torn-to-pieces-hood”.

I recommend this lovely book, full of gentle wisdom and questions that make you look at your life in a new way.

The subtitle to this book is “The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller”. Many of us who are tired of hearing about the parade of wars and failed conquests that make up traditional histories are eager to hear about the lives of ordinary people in centuries long past. The problem, of course, is that there is little in the way of written records about peasants who could not read or write. Ronald Hutton, author of The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700, makes use of churchwarden's accounts and household accounts to determine English seasonal rituals and pastimes, looking for example at the time when churches paid for minstrels or morris dancers. Similarly, Ginzburg here examines trial records to bring to life Domenico Scandella, also know as Menocchio, a miller who was brought to trial by the Inquisition.

He was born in 1532 in Montereale, a small hill town in what is now Italy. Although only a peasant, Menocchio could read and write. He was given or loaned books by friends among the upper classes and priesthood: the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, etc. Not only did he read them carefully, but he thought long and hard about them, developing his own philosophy and his own interpretation of Christianity. “God is nothing but a little breath,” he told his neighbors. Priests and monks are like the Devil, who “want to become gods on earth.” Christ was only a man, and the only law that should be followed is to “Love God and your neighbor”. He denounced the way the rich treated the poor and talked of the need for “a new world and a new way of life.”

He also came up with his own creation story, using the elements of his daily life: “all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels . . . there was also God, he too having been created out of that mass at the same time.”

Naturally once these deviations from the church's dogma came to the attention of the Inquisition, they had Menocchio arrested. The records of his two trials are curious because he seems almost grateful for the opportunity to express his views to men learned enough to follow them. The judges pushed him to explain further and treated him with respect. Initially he was sentenced to prison instead of the stake. Released after two years due to ill health and good behavior, however, he soon slipped back into his old ways and found himself on trial again. The pope himself intervened, so there was no leniency at the second trial.

Ginzburg traces Menocchio's philosophy to “ a common store of traditions, myths, and aspirations handed down orally over generations.” As a writer, what I found most interesting was the way Menocchio interpreted what he read. Ginzburg speaks of “a screen that he unconsciously placed between himself and the printed page: a filter that emphasized certain words while obscuring others, that stretched the meaning of a word, taking it out of its context, that acted on Menocchio's memory and distorted the very words of the text.”

All readers do this, filter what we read through our own prejudices and knowledge, placing it in relation to what we already know. I am often tempted when I write to tell the reader everything. See? I want to say. This connects to that! But I know that it is far more effective to put the pieces out there and let readers make the connections themselves. That active work of imagination is the true reward of reading.

This very readable book of the history of one man in sixteenth-century Italy has given me much to think about. I want to learn more about this oral tradition that informed Menocchio's thinking, and have already acquired another of Ginzburg's books.

Innocent Book Trailer

I was delighted to find this Captain Alatriste adventure at the annual library booksale. Pérez-Reverte is one of my favorite authors. I've blogged previously about The Sun Over Breda which actually follows this one in the series. I've also enjoyed his mysteries, like The Flanders Panel but two of his other novels are my favorites: The Painter of Battles and The Fencing Master.

The Captain Alatriste series at first seemed to me a departure from his other novels. These swashbuckling adventures about a hard-bitten swordsman during the Thirty Years War in the 17th century are narrated by íñigo Balboa—only thirteen in this story—who has been plucked from the streets of Madrid by Alatriste. The Captain may not say very much, but when danger looms, he is quick to pull his dagger and wrap his cloak around his arm. Although accustomed to killing, Alatriste has his own code. He is another Shane, a Jack Reacher, though perhaps with a harder heart.

In this book, while between campaigns, Alatriste's assistance is sought by the poet Quevedo, a friend of long-standing who is engaged to help a man who served under another of Quevedo's friends; obligations are important in this world and life cheap. Don Vicente de la Cruz needs to rescue his daughter from the convent where she serves as a novice because the priest treats the place as his private harem. The family's position is further complicated because they are conversos; Don Vicente's great-grandfather was a Jew who converted to Christianity when Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews in. Anyone who is not an Ancient Christian runs the risk of being swept up by the increasingly brazen arms of the Inquisition.

Attacking a convent is a risky prospect, even for the experienced Alatriste. When things go sideways, he must employ every means to save íñigo's and his own skins, not just swordplay but delicate diplomacy. Pérez-Reverte is especially adept at conveying the politics of the time without disrupting or delaying the action. However, these stories are more than just popcorn. Bits of information are buried like golden nuggets in the fast-paced action.

We are in the Spain of Philip IV, the young emperor. íñigo says of him, “Elegant, chivalrous, affable, and weak, he was the plaything of his advisors.” Indeed, Philip dithers while the once-great Spanish empire self-destructs. In íñigo's words, “the monarchy had become an insatiable machine for devouring taxes, while a drained populace received nothing in exchange but the political blunders and the disasters of war.” If this is not enough to make us look around us with new eyes, íñigo mentions later that “Spain (is) always disposed to overlook bad governance, the loss of the fleet of the Indies, or a defeat in Europe, with merriment—a boisterous festival, a Te Deum, or a few good bonfires.”

I remember hearing controversy in my youth about Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The notion that empire have lifetimes just as you and I do shocked many who didn't want to believe that the apparently indestructible American empire of the 1950s and 1960s was only the latest in a wave of empires and would go the way of the others. When I first visited Rome and walked among the ruins of the Forum right there in the middle of the bustling city, I wondered how Roman natives were affected by this reminder of their former glory. In their place, would I be saddened by the loss of glory or resent those who replaced us? Would I feel perennially inadequate compared to my forebears?

So this diverting adventure story took me down dark and haunted paths. I believe, along with Gibbons, that the loss of civic virtue can bring down an empire. I believe that unnecessary wars can drain empires as diverse as 17th century Spain and 20th century Britain. I believe that we can learn from the past, and that Pérez-Reverte's depiction of how religious intolerance prevented Spain from recovering its strength is a lesson we need to hear, once—that is—we get our breath back from the exciting, action-packed race to the story's end. Pérez-Reverte may have set out to write a light entertainment, but his intelligence and heart add nuance and depth without detracting from the thrilling ride.

A new collection of stories from Alice Munro is always an occasion for celebration. Her wry, conversational tales give us a slice of life, the life of someone previously unimagined by us but immediately welcome. Her women, men, children and teens mostly live in small towns or other semi-isolated places. Even when they venture into the city, as Ray does in “Leaving Maverley” to get care for his seriously ill wife, they remain within themselves.

I remember working on a dairy farm one year, when my friend’s father died and she had to leave college in our last semester to run the farm. When my classes were done, I went to join her, partly to help out and partly to learn about this way of life so different from my life in the city. What I discovered was the reason she sometimes went quiet, withdrawing into an impenetrable inner space. Once I learned to drive the tractor and use the milking machines, I spent hours in my own head, gazing out over the wide rolling fields or moving cows in and out of the stalls. My thoughts slowed to the pace of the rumbling tractor, and I found I could effortlessly turn off the chatter that used to interrupt my attempts at meditation. I learned to move through emptiness with the cool confidence born of habit.

Munro challenges her characters’ self-sufficiency with forays into emotional connections. In “To Reach Japan” Greta hires a sitter for her young daughter and attends a cocktail party for writers to meet an editor visiting Vancouver. She is uncertain how to talk to the strangers at the party, so indulges in a couple of unexpectedly strong drinks. Quickly finding herself too tipsy to do more than sit on the floor, she is rescued and driven home by a writer in town from Toronto. Afterwards, she does not know what to make of this experience. The plot continues to twist in its quiet way and delivers an unexpected ending. In “Amundsen” Vivien Hyde goes to work as a teacher in a sanatarium far out in the Canadian woods, where she begins to develop relationships with a young girl and the director. Both relationships stutter along, jumping about, keeping Vivien and us wondering how they will turn out. Again and again in these stories, Munro looks at that first moment of contact and what intimacy may or may not evolve as a result.

The real bonus in this collection, which I received as an advance review copy from the publisher, are the last four pieces. Munro says in a note that they are “autobiographical in feeling, though not, entirely so in fact.” Yet they form a consistent picture of a girl growing up on a farm in rural Ontario during the 1930s and 40s. These are a child’s perceptions filtered through an adult mind. At first they seem haphazardly thrown together, and the author denies employing fiction’s structural tricks, saying of a man mentioned once that “he does not have any further part in what I’m writing now, in spite of his troll’s name, because this is not a story, only life.” Yet they do function as stories, each building to a quiet revelation that the author—a trickster under her quiet demeanor—might turn around and deny in the last paragraph.

Like the best fiction, Munro’s stories take us into the heads of the people our lives brush up against and help us better understand and appreciate them. What is your favorite Munro story?

When I heard the title of this book mentioned during Tóibín's appearance at a local college last week, I knew I had to have it. I first encountered his work at a used tool and book sale in a small market town in the Midlands. Rows of long tables filled the town hall, stacked with old saber saws and wrenches, as well as piles of well-thumbed books. I picked up a copy of The Heather Blazing, intrigued by the title, and devoured it that night. I liked it so much that I made my book club read it, and they too thought it one of the best books we'd read. We're all Tóibín fans now and have gone on to read together The Master and Brooklyn.

I have heard Tóibín speak three times now, and each time been impressed by the gravity, thoughtfulness, and generosity that he brings to his art and craft. These qualities are apparent in the essays collected in this book, all of them previously published in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and other journals and anthologies. As a long-time LRB subscriber, I recognised some of the essays, but within the context of this book found their significance changed slightly, becoming deeper and widening through association.

In the prologue “Jane Austen, Henry James, and the Death of the Mother”, Tóibín introduces the approach used in this collection. He refers to a book I found useful: Ruth Perry's Novel Relations, in one chapter of which she describes the curious lack of mothers in eighteenth-century novels and posits both literary expediency—a protagonist will not be interesting if rendered powerless and submissive by the protection of her mother—and “existential necessities”—the absence of the heroine's source leaving her disconnected and alone. I first came across this idea of motherless children in Adrienne Rich's essay “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman” in Ms in 1973; to my joy, the article is referenced by Perry. Tóibín says that “the novel is a form ripe for orphans . . . mothers get in the way in fiction.” It is the development of the individual that novels explore, “when the heroine is alone, with no one to protect her, no one to confide in, no one to advise her, and no possibility of this.” He goes on to explore Austen and James's novels in terms not only of separation from the birth family, but in later works, the struggle within a marriage.

From here Tóibín examines the family dynamics of a variety of authors. While the second half of the book focuses on writers from around the world, such as Mann, Borges, and Baldwin, the first half of the book concentrates on Irish writers, such as Yeats, Synge, Beckett, Roddy Doyle. This layering of the Irish experience brings in influences beyond the extended family of parents, aunts and uncles to include Irish political figures and the fatherland itself.

I'm currently reading a novel set in Ireland in which a man talks about growing up among the elderly veterans of the 1916 uprising and Civil War. He finds it hard to believe that these quiet men and women puttering among their roses once raised fierce and courageous arms to reclaim their country. The best novels help us comprehend these individual journeys. At the same time, novelists are driven by their own concerns, creating “a metaphor for what is essentially a private ache”, as Tóibín says of Sebastian Barry. Tóibín makes suggestions but draws no easy roadmap, cautioning that “all fiction comes from a direct source and makes its way indirectly to the page or the stage. It does so by finding metaphors, by building screens, by working on half truths, moulding them towards a form that is both pure and impure fabrication.”

When the title of this book was mentioned last week, the audience laughed uneasily, and Tóibín drily agreed that it was not the best marketing ploy. I, however, thinking immediately of Rich and Perry and my own struggles to wrench free of controlling parents, wanted to purchase it on the basis of the title alone. Luckily I enjoyed the entire book. For me, these essays accomplished the highest purposes of such writing: they made me want to reread authors whose work I know well; they pushed me to explore the work of authors new to me; and they gave me insights that I can use in my own work.

Songs are stories, too, even when there are no words. Thanks to my friends for all the great music and for all the sweet dances.

Moon River, Frank Sinatra
Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, Edith Piaf
La Vie En Rose, Edith Piaf
Rose of Sharon, Jacqueline Schwab
My Wild Irish Rose, Keith Jarrett
Mcferrin: Stars, Yo-Yo Ma, Bobby McFerrin
Morricone: The Mission – Gabriel's Oboe, Yo-Yo Ma,
Lately, Aengus Finnan
Black Is The Colour, Aengus Finnan
Mandalay, Jeff Warner
Botany Bay, Kate Rusby
Arthur's Rose, Walt Michael & Company
Helpless, Neil Young
Remember Me, Willie Nelson
Blue Eyes Crying In the Rain, Willie Nelson
Blue Moon With Heartache, Rosanne Cash
Across The Blue Mountains, Suzannah & Georgia Rose
The Collier's Daughter, Schwab/Risk
Mad Robin, Bare Necessities
Bonny Cuckoo, Bare Necessities
Urge for Going, Tom Rush
No Regrets, Tom Rush
A Love Before Time (Mandarin), Tan Dun & Yo-Yo Ma
Bach: Orchestral Suite #3 In D, BWV 1068 – Air, Yo-Yo Ma, Bobby McFerrin
Adagio, Ludwig Spohr, Grande Duo Op. 11
Purcell: King Arthur Or The British Worthy, Wynton Marsalis

It was Atom Egoyan's film of The Sweet Hereafter that first brought me to Russell Banks. Those of his books that I've read capture that side of New England I came to know well when I lived in Worcester: the long winters, the gritty effort to get on. With this novel, we enter a different world. As it opens, wealthy Dr. Cole, his wife and adopted daughter Vanessa are celebrating the Fourth of July with their friends at the Cole's camp in the Adirondacks. The camp, of course, is a luxurious log home on a lake and is part of the Reserve, “a forty-thousand-acre privately owned wilderness” containing a number of such camps as well as the Tamarack Country Club.

The party is disrupted by the noise of a plane that appears over the lake, transgressing all the rules of the Reserve, and settles down on its pontoons at the Cole's dock. The pilot is famous artist Jordan Groves who has been invited by Dr. Cole to see his collection of paintings. Vanessa, famously beautiful but considered to be wild and quite spoiled, takes Jordan under her wing. Jordan too is wealthy, living on a three-hundred-acre spread not far away with his wife and two sons.

Circumstances change dramatically when Dr. Cole dies later that same evening, removing his flimsy constraints on Vanessa's behavior. The time is 1936, during the run-up to the Second World War. Jordan, a Hemingway-esque figure, loves to go adventuring to far corners of the world, but feels pressure to stay home with his family instead of joining the Air Force. The story circles around Jordan and Vanessa as they dance forward and away from each other, while suspicions grow about Dr. Cole's death and the country barrels towards war.

Interspersed with their story are short, italicised chapters relating events that initially seem to have nothing to do with the main story. Eventually, of course, all becomes clear. I'm generally not a fan of such mash-ups and loathe reading more than a paragraph of italicised text, so I was a little irritated by these chapters. However, I loved the descriptions of flying. I also enjoyed several of the minor characters, such as Hubert St. Germaine, a local guide, and Russell Kendall, the manager of the country club. I was far more interested in the lives of the locals than the shenanigans of the rich, but that probably says more about me than the book. I appreciated the parallels between the self-destructive course the main characters choose and the descent of the world into war.

I'd like to hear about other reactions to this book or to any of Russell Banks's novels.