I've heard a lot about what a great writer Mary Gaitskill is. Looking through the descriptions of her books, though, they seemed to be about subjects that didn't interest me: obsession, addiction, porn, and what sounded like self-conscious flirting with sexual kinks. I pictured a smiling two-year-old sneaking looks at you out of the corner of her eye as she reaches for the glass bowl she's been told not to touch.

What I found is something quite different. If the mark of a great writer is her ability to immerse you in her world and the life of her characters, Gaitskill is a great writer. Even more so given the flimsy material she chose to work with in this novel.

We first meet Alison when she is, by her own account, old and sick, her beauty gone. She's in her forties, which tells you a lot about her right there. She reflects on her life, running away from home at 15, eventually becoming a model. However, since she is shallow and undisciplined, we cannot expect a deep and disciplined narrative. It jumps around in time, held together by a tenuous web of associations. Supremely self-centered, we cannot expect Alison to understand, much less help us comprehend, the other people in her life, including Veronica, the odd friend she makes while working as an office temp before going back to modeling.

If this sounds like a book you don't want to read, think again. Alison is curiously innocent, like a Parzival set adrift in the whirling, wicked world of 1980s New York and Paris. Despite her self-centeredness, she has no sense of who she is; there is an empty space at her center which she fills with the reflections of herself in others' eyes. She runs away from home because that is what teens do in the tv movies that scare her parents. The only thing she seems to know about herself is that she is beautiful, and she knows that not because she admires herself, but because everyone tells her so (though two modeling agents say that her breasts are “not good”). She takes up with an agent in Paris, not because she loves him but because he expects her to.

That lack of self-knowledge is why she is drawn to Veronica, a much older, ugly and flamboyant copy-editor. Obnoxious and rude, Veronica speaks her mind. She says, “‘Prettiness is all about pleasing other people . . . I don't have to do that anymore. It's my show now.' She said these words as if she were a movie star.”

One of Gaitskill's techniques that I loved is the way Alison describes some key moments in terms of ten pictures. Of the conversation quoted above, she says, “Imagine ten pictures of this conversation. In nine of them she's the fool, and I'm the person who has something. But in the tenth I'm the fool, and it's her show now. For just a second, that's the picture I saw.” It's an extraordinary way to show both how much it takes to pierce Alison's insensitivity and how she changes her view of herself based on what other people see.

Alison is proud of herself for befriending this woman who is old and ugly and, eventually, ill. Veronica contracts AIDS from her beloved bisexual on-again/off-again boyfriend, Duncan, who can't be bothered with protection even when he knows he is sick. We are enveloped in the frantic hedonism of the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when so much was rumored and so little understood, when it seemed as though there would be no tomorrow, no need to save any of yourself for a mythical old age.

Although we never really get to know Veronica, since we see her only through Alison's narcissistic eyes, we see her effect on Alison, who comes to regret bragging to others about the peculiar old woman she has befriended.

The writing is indeed excellent. Other reviewers have talked about her word choice and word-pairing, how her sentences seem to hold you off while hinting at their secrets. I liked the interplay of “old” Alison's story with her “wicked” youth. I liked the motifs that, like knots in a net, keep the whole flimsy tale from dissipating into air. This story will stay with me for a long time.

What books have you liked in spite of yourself?

If you've followed this blog, you know that I read a lot of books each year. I also subscribe to the London Review of Books, read other reviews online, and am a member of “Goodreads”: www.goodreads.com/author/show/1453712.B_Morrison. When my son moved to Canada, he introduced me to a slew of wonderful authors who were unknown here in the U.S., several of whom I now count among my top ten favorite authors. Since then, I've made an effort to learn about books by writers from a variety of countries, nearly always in translation unfortunately, but still widening my experience. I've also attended Toronto's International Festival of Authors several times.

All this is to say that I've at least heard of a lot of authors. Still, my friend whom we'll call DAP managed to stump me when he said that his favorite author was Vardis Fisher. That's not a name easily forgotten! I'd never heard of him. So of course I consulted my wonderful local library and selected this book.

Mountain Man is Fisher's most famous book. It's the basis for the film, Jeremiah Johnson starring Robert Redford, a film I've never seen (my film knowledge is much more limited than my knowledge of books!).

Named Samson for his huge size, Sam Minard left his family back in New York state for a brief trip to see the still-unsettled west and fell in love with the mountains and the independent life he found there. Strong and self-reliant, he knows where in the wilderness he's likely to find his friends, the other mountain men who sell furs to purchase the few necessaries, like coffee and tobacco, that they cannot provide for themselves.

Reveling in his freedom and the beauty of his world, Sam responds with the music he learned from his father: “He had learned that playing Bach and Mozart arias [on his mouth organ] when in enemy country was not only good for his loneliness; the music filled skulking Indians with awe.” Many of the descriptions throughout the book use musical terms, as he hears symphonies in the stars and opera in the storms.

Sam is about to add two commitments to his currently loose ties with the other mountain men, one accidentally and one on purpose. He comes across a woman, Kate Bowden, who in a blinding rage has just killed the four Blackfeet who killed her three children. Her husband has been carried off by the rest of the band, and now she has dropped to her knees beside her children and lost all sense of anything outside of them.

Sam buries the children and builds her a little house, though she still seems completely unaware of him and the food he puts in front of her. He has to move on, but spreads the word among his friends and they look in on her when they are near.

He has to get on because he is ready for a wife and knows who he wants, the daughter of a Crow chief. This part of the story alone is worth reading the book for, the negotiations with her father, the way he and the young woman get to know each other without a common language, the way he reacts to this tumultuous change in his life.

I loved this book. The characters fascinated me, especially Kate and the trajectory of her life, but also Sam. The descriptions of a west that no longer exists enthralled me. And I loved all the stories about the other mountain men that they told each other, many of them lies or exaggerations, but true for all that. At one point he imagines what the others are up to at that moment: “in what deep impenetrable thicket tall skinny Bill Williams had hidden from the red warriors, his high squeaky voice silenced for the night; by what fire with its cedar and coffee aroma Wind River Bill was spinning his yarns and saying, ‘I love the wimmins, I shorely do'; in what Spanish village short blond Kit Carson was dancing the soup dance with black-eyed senoritas; what tall tales Jim Bridger was telling to bug-eyed greenhorns from a wagon train that stopped this day at his post to get horses shod and tires set . . .” Scattered throughout Sam's story are these tales of men who relished the independence of life in the mountains.

I'm grateful to my friend, DAP, for recommending this author. What books have your friends recommended that you've liked?

Gardam has been one of my favorite authors since I was introduced to her via “Old Filth”: , recommended by the ever-reliable folks at my local indie bookstore, The Ivy. Her stories remind me a bit of Barbara Pym's because they are about the charming and extraordinary lives of ordinary people. In the memoir workshops I lead, I always say that everyone has a story to share. The most humdrum life has trials and triumphs and moments of grace. Often, reading obituaries of people I never met, I think Wow! I wish I'd known that person.

Even more than Pym, though, Gardam's work reminds me of Ann Tyler's. Tyler is famous for her eccentric characters, portrayed with understanding and compassion. Having grown up in the neighborhood where Tyler often places her characters, I can attest to their accuracy. So perhaps we are all eccentrics and oddballs; some people just hide it better.

In this story, six-year-old Polly Flint is left by her father at a remote yellow house near the Irish sea. After he hands her over to her two aunts, her late mother's sisters, he takes himself off to his ship. Two months later he went down with his ship.

I expected a Jane Eyre sort of story, but Gardam is never predictable. Polly's aunts, pious spinsters, assume from the first that she will be with them always, not as a duty to be undertaken, but as a member of the family. “Never in all the years did they suggest that they had been good to me or that there was the least need for my gratitude, or that I had in any way disturbed their lives.”

For Polly, who has lived in foster homes since her mother's death when Polly was one, she might as well be stranded on a desert island, so isolated from the world does she feel, growing up in the old wooden house. When she stumbles upon Robinson Crusoe in the library, she recognises her soul-mate and life's guide.

And what a life it is! At every turn, when I think I know what is coming next, Gardam outwits me, spinning her tale in another direction. We follow Polly as she grows up, as the twentieth century's wars and evolutions change her enclosed world.

I loved the characters, so unusual and yet so real I felt I must know them. I loved the descriptions: “It was the light at first that was troublesome—the light and the space of the yellow hose. Light flowed in from all sides and down from the enormous sky . . . Here the wind knocked the clouds about over the hills and the marsh and the dunes and the sea, until the house seemed to toss like a ship. I remember that I clutched on to things a good deal.”

Gardam deals efficiently with the challenge of adjusting Polly's first-person voice as she ages. Polly's relationship to the book changes too as she grows, but she never ceases to turn to it for guidance. She never ceases to admire Crusoe as a man and what he accomplished. Some members of my book club felt the references to Crusoe were overdone, but I thought they came at just the right intervals.

This is a lovely read, funny at times and sad at others. I was enchanted by the people Polly meets and what she makes of them. Her life, however ordinary-seeming, is rocked by strong tides and shaken by a family's small rivalries and secrets. I highly recommend it. If you've read any of Gardam's books, what did you think of them?

Going to a performance of Britten's War Requiem by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra seemed an appropriate way to end a week that began with Remembrance Day. Britten wrote it to commemorate the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in 1940 in the devastating bombing raid that killed so many. Coventry and Dresden have always stood as bookends for me of the horrors of the then-new tactic of aerial bombardment.

I want to write about the War Requiem this week instead of a book because music, too, tells a story. That's why I publish my playlist each year. We have more than music here, though. The libretto alternates the words of the requiem mass with poems by Wilfred Owen, the WWI poet who, along with Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and others, dropped the heroic classical references in order to write poems that honestly and directly portrayed life in the trenches and under fire.

Owen's work is a personal favorite; reading his poems sent me on a two-decades-long tramp through the literature of the Great War: poetry, history, letters, memoirs, novels, even a magnificent book by Rose E. B. Coombs, Before Endeavours Fade, that gives directions for finding the old WWI battlefields under present-day towns and farms. The world, the western world anyway, changed forever in August, 1914.

I'm a writer not a musician, but in Britten's magnificent achievement I see the same elements of structure that we look for in novels and other stories: an initiating incident, scenes that vary in intensity but ultimately build to a climax, and a resolution in which the protagonist—and we, ourselves—are changed.

In each scene we want to see the same progression in miniature. In Britten's piece, too, we see each movement varying in emotion, reaching a climax and resolution. The first movement, Requiem Aeternam, starts with the sound of the bells, a motif that will return throughout. Starting gently, with the chorus singing the mournful words “Lord, grant them eternal rest”, the tension builds with drums. Then it quiets again for to a children's choir (backed by an organ) singing of praise and homage, before the chorus returns. Next the orchestra and chorus fall away and the tenor and chamber ensemble take up the racing, angry music and words of Owen's “Anthem for Doomed Youth”: “What passing bells for these who die as cattle? / Only the monstrous anger of the guns.” The poem too follows the same story progression, moving from anger to reflection, and finally to a sad and tender ending “And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.” The bells signal the return of the chorus with the gentle, haunting Kyrie: “Lord, have mercy upon them.”

From there we move into the Dies Irae movement, the day of wrath, with Britten's score bringing to life the bugles, the shattering rifle fire. Its sections move through majesty, vengeance, and supplication, ending with the stunning Lacrimosa section. The soprano singing “On this day full of tears” alternates with tenor's impassioned delivery of Owen's poem “Futility”, which starts: “Move him gently into the sun”, before ending with the chorus singing the Pie Jesu: “Gentle Lord Jesus, grant them rest.”

I won't go through the whole thing, but just say that each movement weaves together these elements: the chorus, orchestra and soprano delivering the traditional requiem mass in all its glory and mystery; the tenor and baritone backed by the chamber ensemble giving us Owen's words as though he and the other grey boys stood there telling us how it really was; and perhaps most heart-breaking of all, the children's choir with their open faces, reminding us that the soldiers once were beloved babies and, at the same time, that these children will in their turn become soldiers in future wars: “Was it for this,” Owen cries, “the clay grew tall?”

I'm sure there are subtleties to the music that I'm missing. I mentioned the motif of the bells. I love the use of motifs and symbols in stories. Paul Scott is a master at their use, not just in his masterpiece, The Jewel in the Crown, but in all his novels. Another motif that Britten uses here is the tritone that the bells sound, that recurs in various ways throughout the work. A tritone is an interval between two notes: three whole tones apart; the bells here are C and F#. It is a dissonant sound, not enough to set my teeth on edge but enough to make me uneasy. The tritone was known in the Renaissance as “the devil in music”—also the name of a terrific mystery by the late Kate Ross—adding symbolic resonance.

There is a progression in Britten's selection of poems from more general to more personal, ending with “Strange Meeting”, where Owen speaks of escaping battle down a tunnel, where he encounters a man who rises from the sleepers there, a man who talks of the “undone years” and “The pity of war”. He says, “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.” The poem ends with the haunting line “Let us sleep now.”

The tenor and baritone repeat this line over and over, in a canon with the children, the chorus, and the soprano singing the In Paradisum: “Into Paradise may the Angles lead thee” and a reprise of the Requiem Aeternam, immensely gentle and tender, powerful in its silences. Then finally the chorus's hushed Requiescant in Pace: “Let them rest in peace. Amen.”

Dressed in buckskins, 19-year-old Ryan Long Pine sends his canoe into Canada's busy Kingston harbor. It is 1837 and he stands out: “Not yet an anachronism, he was a curiosity”. Alone in the world except for the raven who accompanies him, Ryan is not looking for adventure; he is looking for a job. Armed with good carpentry skills learned from his father and trapping skills learned from a stint with a family of Algonquins, he can fend for himself. His work ethic quickly endears him to the shipbuilder where he first applies.

Full of adventure, this story covers the period of the Patriot War, in which rebels attacked Canada eleven times, attempting to liberate it from British rule. The Patriots were a grass-roots organization of Canadians who had run afoul of the British and sympathetic Americans who wanted to extend their republican ideals to their neighbors.

Although he suffered injustice in his native Ireland and on arriving in Canada, Ryan has buried his resentment. His only goal is the quite ordinary one of wanting to find work and make a life for himself. As an Irishman, he refuses to fight for or take orders from the British who still run the colony, but he's not a fire-breathing revolutionary either. He just wants to be left alone. That's all he asks for.

McLaughlin's prose is smart and competent. Backstory is parceled out neatly, and there is a good mix of narrative and scenes. Dialect is used sparingly, with just enough to give the flavor of speech without being overdone.

One thing that would enhance this story is a little more complexity to the characters. Ryan is all good. He doesn't drink or smoke. He's honest and hard-working, trustworthy, loyal, brave, clean and reverent, as the oath goes. On the other hand, the bully he encounters is all bad: dishonest, mean, and vengeful. And ugly to boot: “an unkempt and overweight hunter. . . his jowls shook as his teeth mangled a plug of tobacco. . . his narrow eyes pits of hatred”. Vivid writing, to be sure, but some character shading would make the story more interesting.

This is a good example of a plot-driven story, as opposed to a character-driven story. And it's a terrific plot. Ryan falls in with Bill Johnston, the famous smuggler and river pirate in the Thousand Islands and begins helping with his smuggling operations. Johnston, like many other characters, are actual historical persons; McLaughlin's research is impressive. Ryan also gets involved with the Patriots and participates in some of their daring operations.

It's an exciting tale, tempered by scenes of celebration and solitude. Ryan falls in love with Johnston's daughter, Kate, and is torn between the undertakings of war and the joys of domesticity. Unfortunately, the ending rather trickled away without the expected climax, historically accurate but a bit disappointing. Still, I liked the way it echoed the beginning.

I knew nothing of the Patriot War before reading this novel and am grateful for the opportunity to expand my understanding of U.S./Canada relations. What historical novels have you enjoyed?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a digital copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Michalski's novel, winner of Best Fiction from Baltimore's City Paper, is the story of Stanley Polensky and Calvin Johnson, thrown together in the trenches of WWII, their forced intimacy creating an unlikely friendship between the shy Polish boy from Baltimore and the tough Midwestern farmboy. It is also the story of a girl named Ela Zdunk, who lives with her mother outside the small mountain village of Reszel in Poland in 1806. Ela helps her mother find flowers and roots to use in the tinctures and medicines that Barbara sells or trades to the villagers. They, of course, believe she is a witch; they fear her and propitiate her with gifts of food, enabling Barbara and Ela to scrape out a life of sorts. Until the Prussian soldiers come.

At first the stories of Ela, Stanley and Johnson seem to have nothing in common beyond the existence of an herb discovered by Barbara and given to Stanley by his mother as he departs for war. The herb conveys eternal life.

Not long ago, I read with great interest Julian Barnes's, Nothing to be Frightened of, an honest examination of his fear of death, lightened by his wit and learning. Similarly, Nabokov's Speak, Memory is concerned with trying to escape death. He says, almost like an incantation, like a prayer: “Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”

But what if we do not die? Michalski examines this idea through the interleaved stories of her three main characters: Ela, Stanley and Johnson. Eternal life is a mixed blessing when those around us, those we love, continue to age and pass on. This device, the only fantastical element in a thoroughly realistic novel, underlines the loneliness that is a part of the human condition. Our connections to each other are tenuous at best, but stretched to the breaking point when these characters whom we come to care about try to find the kind of loving relationship where they can feel at home.

Normally I dislike novels that jump around between characters and time periods, but I felt safe in Michalski's hands. She limits each section to one character and time period and provides enough detail to ground the reader instantly at the start of each section. Also, each character's story is told chronologically, which is a comfortingly familiar structure. The remaining slight unease from the dislocation of time and place between sections reinforces the ideas explored in the story.

One factor that usually suffers when moving between a number of separate stories is pacing. It is hard enough in a single narrative to maintain a pace that steadily builds while also having enough variation to hold the reader's interest. How much harder, then, to distribute the pace across three stories. However, Michalski succeeds brilliantly to the point where I had to put aside other responsibilities to race to the end.

Michalski, who has also published several collections of short stories, delivers her tale in prose that seems almost transparent. It is a good mix of natural dialogue, effective description, and brief narrative. Reading it seems as effortless as breathing. The occasional subtle references to other books and stories reward those who recognise them without tripping up those who don't.

The book defies categorization. It's not purely realistic but neither is it science fiction. Perhaps all you need to know is that it is a good read and will—if you allow it—provoke thoughtful and intense conversations with yourself and others about the use we make of our lives and how we touch and care for others. I hope that Julian Barnes reads it because I am sure he will find comfort here.

I've been a fan of Lehane's novels ever since the first one came out, long before the films and the awards. Although their violence is more graphic than I prefer, I love the strength and clarity of his prose, the depth of his characters, and the satisfying intricacy of his plots. I love the way Boston itself is a vibrant character in his stories.

Live by Night is the story of Joe Coughlin, a petty thief who happens to be the son of a chief of police, pulling heists with his two chums, when by mistake they rob a speakeasy owned by the powerful Albert White. Joe, more than his friends, intuits the possibilities in the scene and their ramifications. While they manage to escape with their skins, Joe has left behind his heart, given irrevocably to White's girlfriend, the beautiful Emma Gould, whom he sets out to steal as well.

This story is a sequel of sorts to his immense novel of Boston in the dawn of the 20th century, The Given Day. It's not necessary to have read the earlier novel, in which Joe is a minor character. We start here in 1926, seven years after the end of The Given Day. The Jazz Age is in full swing, and Prohibition is giving rise to criminal mobs while undermining everyone's sense of what it means to be law-abiding.

A tale of gangsters and mobs, filled with the violence and duplicity that comes with that way of life, the story follows Joe's rise in the world of crime, including his eventual move to Florida to build a rum-running empire. It's not a world I would normally choose to read about, but as always Lehane's prose draws me in. I hate the violence, and Joe himself is ambivalent about it.

What I have learned is that violence procreates. And the children your violence produces will return to you as savage, mindless things. You won’t recognize them as yours, but they’ll recognize you. They’ll mark you as deserving of their punishment.

The people in Lehane's novels go beyond stereotypes to probe the complex and conflicting motives and desires that drive us. We make choices, compelled by conscious and unconscious forces, and we learn to live with the consequences.

Joe was reminded, not for the first time, that for such a violent business, it was filled with a surprising number of regular guys—men who loved their wives, who took their children on Saturday afternoon outings, men who worked on their automobiles and told jokes at the neighborhood lunch counter and worried what their mothers thought of them and went to Church to ask god’s forgiveness for all the terrible things they had to render unto Caesar in order to put food on the table.

Joe has always considered himself to be an outlaw, not a gangster. Someone who chooses to go his own way instead of abiding by society's rules, the rules of the daytime whose denizens have “sold out the truth of yourself for the story of yourself”. I remember pulling all-nighters as a student, the sense of power when you look out over the sleeping city and think I alone am awake. I own the night. I own the city.

His father plays a small but critical role here, and the theme of fathers and sons is subtly developed in a number of ways. Delusion and deceit, including self-delusion, thread through both the violence and the tenderness, through the betrayals and the love, the alliances and the friendship.

It takes a lot to keep me interested in a novel about gangsters, especially when it moves from Boston to Florida, but Lehane pulls it off. This book didn't pack the emotional wallop for me that his other books, including The Given Day, deliver but that probably says more about me than about the book. Have you ever been surprised into liking a book that you were sure you'd dislike?

Michel, an austere and studious young man pulls himself away from the history of the Classical world long enough to get married, mostly to please his father who—dying—worried about leaving his son alone in the world. Michel barely knows Marceline, but he respects her and feels some affection for her. It is only when they are embarked on their honeymoon that he discovers she has a life and a mind of her own. A greater surprise is to come when, still traveling in North Africa, Michel, already frail, nearly dies of tuberculosis, only surviving through Marceline's tender and competent care.

He is deeply changed by this experience. Having decided, at his lowest moment, that he wants to live, he devotes himself to life with all the selfish strength of the invalid, demanding certain foods and, as he regains his strength, brushing off Marceline's company to walk out alone.

This is a brief novel, the simplicity of the prose masking the subtle changes Michel undergoes as he struggles to discover what, in his new self-absorption, he actually wants.

To a man whom death's wing has touched, what once seemed important is so no longer; and other things become so which once did not seem important or which he did not even know existed. The layers of acquired knowledge peel away from the mind like a cosmetic and reveal, in patches, the naked flesh beneath, the authentic being hidden there.

He learns to live in the present, indulging himself, following his obsessions. Then, when Marceline becomes pregnant, he begins to imagine a future. It is this investigation into time—its malleability, its deceptiveness, its betrayal—that most interested me. Reading this right after Nabokov’s Speak, Memory seemed a continuation of that conversation. I was reminded too of Rilke's poem, one I always think of at this time of year:

Already the ripening barberries are red,
and the old asters barely breathe in their beds.
The man who is not rich now as summer goes
will wait and wait and never be himself.

The other aspect of the novel which fascinated me was the more obvious theme of selfishness versus generosity, balancing what we owe to others with what we owe to ourselves. Gide brilliantly works that theme through Michel's story, with Marceline and other characters providing alternate possibilities. I highly recommend this short but powerful novel. It will set you thinking.

Rereading this remarkable memoir has been even more delightful than the first time. And more awe-inspiring. From the poetic beauty of his sentences to the intricate structure of the book, Nabokov's consummate writing skills are on display.

The memoir covers his youth and young adulthood, up to the age of 40 when he and his wife, Vera, emigrated to the U.S. The chapters are arranged thematically rather than strictly chronologically. So, for example, one chapter is the story of the most memorable of his nannies, Mademoiselle, while another is about his first attempts at poetry.

All of the chapters are suffused with nostalgia for the lost world of his youth, a golden time as the favored eldest son in a wealthy, aristocratic family in Tsarist Russia. Nabokov maintains that our understanding of that time has been colored by Soviet propaganda, and that it was in fact a time when Russians enjoyed a great deal of freedom of speech and press.

His parents moved between a large house in St. Petersburg, made of pink granite with frescoes just under the roofline, and Vyra, the enchanted country estate whose loss he most mourns, with vacations in Biarritz. Nabokov evokes these very personal recollections with an emotional intensity that leaves me feeling that I too made a house behind the sofa and watched in mortification and pity as my tutor gave a thoroughly pedantic and boring talk with lantern slides to the sons of neighboring landowners. He accomplishes this through the specificity and relevance of his details and the resonant beauty of his prose.

I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumble bee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

Though of course they do. Another resonance is historical. Approximately the same age as the 20th century, Nabokov's loss of his golden childhood world with the Russian Revolution in 1919 coincides with the western world's loss of a way of life. The Great War ended England's long Edwardian afternoon; the countries on both sides were never the same after the loss of a generation and the economic destruction of the war.

The intensity also comes from his surprising and piercing images. For example, he ends one chapter recalling how his father used to be summoned from the dinner table to mediate some local disagreement. The gratitude of the peasants tended to take the form of tossing him up in the air three times, like the old woman of song tossed up in a blanket. Nabokov sees him through the window:

There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky.

Note the unexpected, yet perfect word choices: “sprawling”, “imperturbable”.

These incidents remind me of the advice from noted memoirist, William Zinsser, whom I often quote in my workshops: “ Look for small self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you still remember them it’s because they contain a universal truth that your readers will recognize from their own life.” It's up to you to delve into them to discover that truth.

I wanted to talk more about the structure. Each chapter is a perfect circle, ending where it began. Or perhaps a spiral: “In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.” After all, we arrive at the end with a deeper understanding, a more intense experience. The book as a whole follows the same pattern, with a most satisfying ending that pulls together unexpected pieces.

In this book Nabokov is concerned with the workings of time and memory and loss. He uses certain themes or threads to stitch together his thoughts. Some are obvious like his Lepidoptera adventures, and some more subtle, such as the rainbow theme.

Speak, Memory is on a couple of lists of best nonfiction books, one of the 20th century and one of all time. It is a true masterpiece, stunning on every level.

This graphic novel, a gift from my dear friend, Kate, is a fabulous introduction to the Civil Rights Movement for those too young to tackle Taylor Branch's trilogy. Nate Powell is responsible for the dramatic graphics, while Andrew Aydin is the co-writer with Lewis. It's not a dry history. Instead, it is Lewis's personal story which makes it far more powerful.

Personal stories, truthful ones, are the way we open ourselves and learn each other's truths, the way we find our common ground.

The authors use the device of Obama's inauguration day on 20 January 2009. A woman has come from Atlanta with her two small boys for the inauguration and has brought them to Lewis's office to show it to him. Although he is on his way to the ceremony, Lewis takes the time to show them some of the mementoes in his office, one of which leads him to tell them about his childhood on a farm in Alabama.

This is Book 1. It goes up to the lunch counter sit-ins, ending with Martin Luther King, Jr. coming to Nashville to support Lewis's group. Of course I have vivid memories of the events described here. One thing I'd forgotten was how unsupportive the older generation of African-Americans were of the boycotts and sit-ins. Lewis portrays them as comfortable with the status quo and willing to accept partial solutions.

I'm sure he's right, but I also remember real concerns about giving up the separate-but-equal facilities. Just as single-sex schools allowed girls to learn in an environment where they aren't being pummeled by the social mandate to not outshine the boys, schools were a safe—if deficient—haven for youngsters of color. Similarly, many today still mourn the loss of the thriving Black centers of culture that faded away after integration.

Not that anyone wants to go back. The graphic novel format is especially effective at conveying the overt and hateful racism of the time. Though I occasionally wonder if that wouldn't be better than today's pervasive if covert racism—opposing commonsense laws simply because a Black president signed them—these pictures remind me of how much worse it was.

I look forward to the rest of the books in the series and hope they are widely read.