fiction

Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

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I read this first novel by the author of the Gilead series a long time ago. Or rather, I sank into it, stunned by its richness. Sisters Ruth and Lucille are being brought up by their grandmother on the outskirts of Fingerbone, a small town uncomfortably situated on a lake somewhere in the northwest part of the U.S. “It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below.”

Whether it is flooding the town or receding into its secrets, the lake is a powerful force. The girls’ grandfather died when his train ran off the bridge over the lake, and their mother, after dropping them at their grandmother’s, drove off a cliff into the same lake.

After their grandmother, who retained a few social ties with the town, dies, Aunt Sylvie takes over caring for the girls. However, her idea of providing for them is to hoard empty cans and newspapers, to buy them sparkly pink slippers instead of school clothes. Sylvie prefers the windows open and the lights off, regardless of the season or clock.

With Ruthie as our guide, we experience the wonders and costs of eccentricity. The girls must carry their losses and construct a way to order their lives. They must decide whether to take refuge in the ordinary world or remain open to the revelations that it masks.

On this second reading, I was again entranced by the voice of the novel. Slightly old-fashioned, deliberate, unsentimental, it not only adds substance to the strangeness of this household, but also moves fluidly between actual description and metaphysical exploration. Details—unexpected, alive, perfect—make it work. For example Ruth describes the scenes her grandfather painted on the bed, chest and wardrobe he made, and then says:

Each of these designs had been thought better of and painted out, but over years the white paint had absorbed them, floated them up just beneath the surface. I was always reminded of pictures, images, in places where images never were, in marble, in the blue net of veins at my wrists, in the pearled walls of seashells.

This time I was better able to appreciate the extraordinary choreography of the book. In only the second paragraph we are told:

The terrain on which the town itself is built is relatively level, having once belonged to the lake. It seems there was a time when the dimensions of things modified themselves, leaving a number of puzzling margins, as between the mountains as they must have been and the mountains as they are now, or between the lake as it once was and the lake as it is now. Sometimes in the spring the old lake will return.

Margins such as these—fluid, unstable, unreliable—are explored throughout the book. The sounds in the night may be ghosts or crickets. Perhaps what has disappeared may be distilled by remembering, desolation healed by creating small strongholds. Perhaps even the most final margin would yield to someone like Sylvie who “felt the life of perished things.”

There are a few other images that also recur in the story, accruing meaning, adjusting our perception of the characters and their choices. This is an element of creative writing that I particularly enjoy, and Robinson handles it beautifully.

What really makes this unusual story work, for me anyway, is the absence of censure. The townspeople may judge Sylvie, the mother, the girls, but the author does not. There are only choices, neither good nor bad, just choices.

I look forward to reading this book again in a few years. Who knows what I will find?

Have you reread a favorite novel and found it even richer than you remembered?

A Fortnight in September, by R. C. Sherriff

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Touted as an escape from the pandemic, this 1931 novel follows a lower-middle-class London family as they go on their annual vacation to the seaside holiday spot Bognor Regis.

Mr. Stevens carefully updates his Marching Orders, the list of what each person needs to do to prepare for the trip, not out of an autocratic need to control but from a genuine desire to have things go well for everyone. Mrs. Stevens hides her terror of the sea because her family always has such a good time. Dick at 17 and Mary at 20 good-humoredly go along with their father—no teenage rebellion here. Only young Ernie kicks up a ruckus, wanting to bring his toy yacht even though it is inappropriate for the sea.

They always stay at the same place, the Seaview, even though the place and its landlady are not aging well. But the Stevens family are loyal to the good old Seaview. This gentle narrative lets us enjoy the peculiar pleasure of stepping out of ordinary life into a brief vacation, one that is so much the same every year that it has become a ritual.

While the pace rarely quickens beyond a brief flutter, such as the one over whether to rent a slightly more expensive beach hut, one of the interesting threads in this story is about time. Of course, there is the cliché about time racing when you’re doing something fun and standing still when you’re not, and the changes time is bringing to the Seaview and Mrs. Huggett. However, there are also more interesting insights, such as this one:

They had reached the strange, disturbing little moment that comes in every holiday: the moment when suddenly the tense excitement of the journey collapses and fizzles out, and you are left, vaguely wondering, … [w]hether the holiday, after all, is only a dull anti-climax to the journey.

There’s also the way Mr. Stevens makes little special occasions and traditions for his family “to strengthen the links of a home.” And the way this annual vacation becomes a time outside of time for the family, though haunted by its finite nature.

The man on his holidays becomes the man he might have been, the man he could have been, had things worked out a little differently. All men are equal on their holidays: all are free to dream their castles without thought of expense, or skill of architect. Dreams based upon such delicate fabric must be nursed with reverence and held away from the crude light of tomorrow week.

I was alone in my book club and seemingly alone as well among the avalanche of positive reviews at being dismayed by the portrayal of this family. They seemed unrealistically superficial to me. For example, they do everything together and are unfailingly sweet to each other. There’s no interpersonal tension; they are a whole family of Beths from Little Women.

Of course, they do fit in with the saccharine characters in popular stories of the time, something I tried to remind myself. And the story is clearly meant to be a diversion, a beach read rather than a literary experiment. No point expecting the complexity of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves published the same year.

But what I kept coming back to is the class issue. In the extract from the author’s autobiography appended to the book, Sherriff says while on holiday at Bognor he enjoyed watching people and trying to imagine their lives. Eventually, he decided to choose one at random and “build up an imaginary story of their annual holiday by the sea.”

And the people he imagined are simple people, so simple as to seem fairly brainless. They are content with their tiny, tightly constrained lives, with rarely a thought beyond—on rare occasions—career advancement or lack thereof (Mr. Stevens), having a little time to herself at night (Mrs. Stevens), cricket (Dick and Ernie), or possible romance (Mary).

Mr. Stevens buys a Times for the train because he likes “the feeling of culture it gave out” and enjoys a few little articles that make him wonder about things that he might “find out about . . . one day, when he had the time.” Mr. Stevens goes for a long walk every year to think things through. This year Dick goes on one too. So we are treated to an extended look at their stunted and unimaginative thought processes.

Yes, it’s a restful and sweet novel with many little nuggets that gave me a jolt of recognition, thinking Oh, yes, that’s exactly how it is. I just wish the author could have looked past the snobbish stereotype that the lower classes are just simple people living simple lives and perfectly happy that way. In his famous play and film Journey’s End about WWI, Sherriff gives Mason the cook much more depth, enough to equal the officers, though that may be the brilliance of Toby Jones’s performance rather than the written lines.

In this book, there is no hint of that war, except perhaps in Mr. Stevens refusal to look more deeply into the news. However, here another interesting thread is about change. The vacation is an annual ritual, carefully reenacted, yet there is the parents’ concern that Dick and Mary might be getting too old for it and want to do something else or perhaps stay somewhere else. We do see both young adults starting, however tentatively, to think of life beyond the family.

Then there are the changes to the Seaview and Mrs. Huggett. Most of all, as one member of my book club pointed out, there’s the fact in only eight years a power-hungry autocrat will start another war, one that will devastate England and change their lives forever.

What is your favorite beach read this summer?

The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters

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After the carnage of the Great War, many women in England found themselves condemned to spinsterhood. That’s not why in 1922 Frances Wray remains unmarried and living with her mother in South London, where their lives are circumscribed by the endless domestic chores, church on Sundays, and occasional visits with a few friends.

Frances does the domestic work, her mother being elderly and still grieving for the loss of her sons in the war. They once had a servant, but after the death of Frances’s father, the two women discovered that he had left them nothing but debts. By the time of the story, they have decided that their only recourse is to take in lodgers, dressing up the idea by calling them paying guests.

Enter Lillian and Leonard Barber. Members of the “clerk class,” they take up residence in the newly created apartment on the second floor and quickly change the atmosphere of the house, with their lively music and visits from Lillian’s rambunctious, working class family. Still the Wray women are more puzzled than distressed. What upsets the applecart is Frances’s growing attraction to Lillian.

The author brilliantly captures the peculiar intimacy of families sharing a wall, something I’m familiar with from living in rowhouses, triple-deckers, and a duplex (aka semi-detached). You try not to listen, but nonetheless find yourself having an unwelcome familiarity with their routines. Sometimes you even speculate about what’s going on over there.

Vividly captured as well is the domestic life of the period. The author gives us enough of Frances’s routine to understand what a burden housework was before the “labor-saving” devices we are accustomed to, without letting those passages become boring. She does this by exquisite detail, carefully chosen, and sometimes by making them part of action scenes.

I was surprised and impressed by the author’s handling of the class differences between the three families. Though never coming out and saying something like They are not our sort, Mrs. Wray remains aloof from the Barbers and Lillian’s family. However, Frances begins to enter the lives of both and seems to be free of that sort of class consciousness.

In fact, the psychological portrayal of Frances is what helped me stick with this overlong book. A fascinating character to start with, Frances changes with exposure to new information or outlooks, each transformation believable within the story.

The other thing that kept me going was the narrator Juliet Stevenson, one of my favorite actors. Having her voice in my ear is always a pleasure.

Who are your favorite audiobook narrators?

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce

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I enjoyed Miss Benson’s Beetle so much that I went back to look at this, Joyce’s first novel. The recently retired Harold has too much time on his hands. His wife Maureen keeps their home in a small village in southern England immaculate, seemingly angry at Harold though it is not clear why. For Harold “Days went by and nothing changed; only his waist thickened, and he lost more hair.”

Then a letter arrives, addressed to him in a shaky scrawl. It is from a former colleague Queenie Hennessy. They had been assigned to work together and had become friends, although they’d had no contact since she had moved away many years ago. She is now in hospice and writing to say goodbye.

Harold struggles to find the right words, but eventually writes a short note to her and sets off down the lane to post it. But he keeps walking, and walking, and eventually realises that he is going to deliver it by hand, walking the 500 miles north to Queenie’s hospice. After talking with a “girl in a garage” who teaches him how to microwave a burger and relates her story of keeping her aunt alive through faith, Harold sends Queenie a note telling her to wait for him.

Even the most analytical person can succumb to magical thinking. Harold comes to believe that he is walking to save Queenie. He is ridiculously unprepared, with no supplies or appropriate clothing, wearing yachting shoes which quickly wear out and give him terrible blisters.

What makes the story work is Joyce’s tone. She doesn’t make fun of Harold or look down on him. She presents each incident as it comes, leaving the reader to decide how we feel about Harold, and about Maureen, who finds that she misses Harold once he has gone. I fretted about Harold’s unworldliness, spending down his retirement as he journeys, not knowing how to care for his feet properly. Yet it is his innocence that draws people to him, almost all displaying the kindness and generosity that coexist with the hatefulness we see in the media.

This isn’t a fairytale. Pain is a constant. Not just the physical pain of walking day after day, but the emotional pain of reliving past mistakes, which is where Harold’s mind goes as he walks: his bleak marriage, the promising son who no longer visits, the self-loathing reinforced not only by their rebuffs but also the early rejection by his parents. And both he and Maureen have some kind of unfinished business with Queenie.

The aspect of novel-writing that I struggle with most is deciding when to reveal information. An author wants to create suspense by withholding information but revealing enough as they go along to reward the reader, as well as dropping clues along the way. Even in non-mysteries, most readers want to puzzle out what’s going on before being told.

Here, I felt the pacing of reveals was off. I don’t want to go into detail for fear of giving away too much. I just felt that the backstage machinery was too obvious in places. It’s good to have this model to set against other books where I found the pacing of reveals to be more organic and more satisfying.

I appreciated the changes Harold goes through during his walk, from his introspective moments to his painful losses of direction. I especially liked his experiences of England’s countryside, villages and towns on foot. I often walk in England for a week or ten days at a time, and have found it a vastly different experience than with any other form of transportation.

There were parts of the book I didn’t find as interesting and was tempted to skip, but I’m glad I took it slowly and persisted to the end. I’m also intrigued by the idea of a modern-day pilgrimage. Quite a few of my friends have been walking the Camino de Santiago. I’m more interested in smaller pilgrimages, at least for now.

If you were to go on a pilgrimage, where would you go and why?

Matrix, by Lauren Groff

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In 1148, Marie de France at 17 has been running her family’s estates since the death of her parents and trying to avoid coming to the attention of Eleanor of Aquitaine, with whom she has a familial connection. When Eleanor does notice her, she declares the tall, sturdy girl with a rural accent too gauche for marriage or life at court, and sends her to England to be prioress of a run-down abbey.

Initially homesick and shocked by the poverty and near-starvation of the nuns, Marie summons the strength of her predecessors: a long line of women warriors and crusaders.

Fine then, she thinks with bitterness. She will stay in this wretched place and make the best of the life given her. She will do all that she can do to exalt herself on this worldly plane. She will make those who cast her out sorry for what they’ve done. One day they will see the majesty she holds within herself and feel awe.

She sets herself to rebuilding the abbey’s prosperity, its fields and sheepfolds, its income-producing business of copying illuminated manuscripts, and its body of nuns. These new sisters—some prickly older women, some giggling girls, some laborers—support her as she finds their hidden talents and sets them to work that best uses their strengths. Later she begins to have visions, which call on her to create an “island of women” protected from men and the corrupt world by a massive labyrinth: Marie hiding once again from a misogynistic world, this time with her sisters.

Fueled by Groff’s energetic prose, the book traces Marie’s entire life at the abbey, her many successes and rare failures. The world of the abbey comes alive, the texture of its life, the cold of early-morning prayers, the taste of a rare treat, the ways of healing. The handful of nuns we get to know are presented as memorable individuals with their own strengths and flaws.

In this fictional Marie, Groff combines two historical characters: Marie de France, a 12th century French poetess who wrote a collection of lais about courtly romance, and Marie d’Anjou, Abbess of Shaftesbury. There is a theory that they might be the same person, but it is unproven. I would have liked to hear more about Marie the poetess, but accept that is not this book.

Here Groff instead gives us a model of a powerful, indomitable woman, canny and visionary, much like Eleanor of Aquitaine but with a Christian moral code. While I love seeing a strong woman succeed, Marie’s accomplishments strain my credulity. Building the maze that protects the abbey like Briar Rose’s castle is one thing, but going on to design and build new machines, roads, dams, and fortifications with military precision?

Where the book started to lose steam for me was when challenge after challenge is met and defeated by Marie immediately. I love her bent for management, her practicality. I love her foresight and the political acumen that leads her to create an international network of spies (often women) and protectors. I appreciate the narrow path she walks between power and pride.

Yet, after a while, the stakes begin to seem very low once we know that Marie’s superpowers will resolve every issue within a few pages. I found it particularly hard to believe that an incipient cult among the young nuns and, later, a revolt about Marie’s going against the church’s teachings would both simply evaporate.

Still, the powerful writing carries the book. As a utopian vision, it reminds me of Groff’s Arcadia which I read recently, about a commune. That book dealt closely with the interpersonal tensions and rivalries that warred with the communal ideals of the families. I expected more of that here, more of the interactions between the sisters, the inevitable conflicts that arise among a group of people living together, but Marie’s iron hand seems to preclude them.

In the end, I’m glad I read this story of a powerful woman. Marie will stay with me for a long time.

Have you read anything by Lauren Groff? What did you think of it?

The Great Alone, by Kristin Hannah

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Thirteen-year-old Leni Allbright is used to her family picking up and moving on the spur of the moment. Now, her father Ernt, having lost yet another job, has decided to move them to Alaska where they will live off the grid on land he has suddenly inherited from his Vietnam War buddy. Leni hopes this will be the new start that will make everything okay and—a great reader—she’s excited to be going to the place Jack London called the Great Alone. Her frail, former hippie mother Cora will follow her husband anywhere.

Mama had quit high school and “lived on love.” That was how she always put it, the fairy tale. Now Leni was old enough to know that like all fairy tales, theirs was filled with thickets and dark places and broken dreams, and runaway girls.

Leni knows that her parents have a deep and abiding love for each other, a bond that held up during Ernt’s long absence in Vietnam and through his often violent behavior since his return. The small family has no homesteading skills, other than Ernt’s mechanical aptitude, and as assets only the rundown VW bus Ernt has bought with almost the last of the money.

When they finally arrive at their land, they find a tiny cabin with no electricity or running water, set in a yard full of old animal bones, rusty machinery, and other junk. Ernt’s friend never had a chance to start fixing the place up before leaving for Vietnam where he died.

It’s 1974. Kaneq is barely even a town. Its people, mostly living in far-flung homesteads, are fiercely independent even as they pull together to help each other when needed. And help is often needed in this unforgiving environment. Luckily for the Allbrights, their neighbors, especially the family of Ernt’s buddy, show up to sort out the cabin and get the family started on a garden, chicken coop, woodpile, and other necessities. Winter will be coming all too soon.

And with it, Ernt begins to fall apart, undone by the darkness—eighteen-hour nights—and cold. He becomes increasingly paranoid and jealous of a wealthy neighbor who is attracted to Cora. He drinks too much and prepares for the coming collapse of society by accumulating guns. His abuse accelerates, but Cora and Leni always forgive him and keep his violence a secret. At the small schoolhouse, Leni meets the son of the neighbor—the only other child her age—and they become best friends.

While much of the prose is rich with detail, especially of the landscape, I found the story lacked subtlety. The characters are all stereotypes: the violent and alcoholic Vietnam vet with PTSD, the brainless hippie who thinks love will cure all, the emotionally and physically strong (despite her obesity) Black woman who runs the general store and cares for Leni in ways her parents don’t, a Romeo and Juliet couple. Every character is either all good or all evil.

And the stereotypes are dangerously naïve: you should give up everything for true love; Black mammies exist to save/serve White people; abused women love their partners too much to leave them; all vets are dangerous maniacs. The author even perpetuates the urban myth that people called vets baby-killers when they got back from Vietnam. It’s possible that happened once or twice, but the people I knew protesting the war would never have done that. We cared about the soldiers; we wanted to bring them home, out of danger. The right-wing media played the baby-killer tape for their own purposes the same way they did Benghazi and the Welfare Queen.

This could have been a fascinating story about the tension between being independent—the U.S.’s cowboy myth—and being part of a community. It could have been a thoroughly interesting story about the process of learning about the land, making mistakes, finding ways to survive. Instead we get a story about abuse and crazy preppers. The story entirely skips over the part about adapting to Alaska, jumping from the initial cluelessness to a comfortable existence with all systems humming.

Thus the family’s success seemed unrealistic to me, not just their ability to survive the winters, but also their finances. They have no money, yet Ernt always has cash for whiskey.

Aside from the characters and stereotypes, I found the plot lacking nuance. The first half is fairly slow, which didn’t bother me, but the second half turned into a whirlwind. Writers are told to constantly make it harder for the protagonist, but this story goes too far: disaster piled upon preventable disaster, bad luck and bad choices, misery and pain.

I found there wasn’t much to hold me. The story became more and more sentimental, which actually made it harder to engage emotionally. I didn’t sense the love for Alaska; characters talked about loving Alaska, but that’s not the same thing. The cartoonish characters left me cold; I didn’t ever sense the love between the young couple, much less between Ernt and Cora—their famous love that was supposed to excuse everything, including the damage to their daughter.

The one emotion I did feel was the pain: Cora’s and even more Leni’s. I know there are complicated reasons for staying in abusive relationships, but True Love as an excuse makes me roll my eyes. Self-centered parents who ignore how they are damaging their child make me want to spit. Leni, like Jane Eyre and countless other unloved children finds her refuge in books.

Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place.

I wanted to like this book. Stories about people confronting a new and challenging environment interest me, and Alaska as a setting is a plus. I did find the writing engaging enough to keep reading it, though I set it down often. Ultimately, though, I was disappointed. Of course, your mileage may vary, and many reviews praise this novel.

What stories about Alaska have you read?

The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles

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In this entertaining new book from the author of A Gentleman in Moscow, 18-year-old Emmett Watson is returned to his family’s farm in June of 1954 by the warden of the work farm where the young man has just served a brief term for involuntary manslaughter. Emmett has a well-thought-out plan for how to create a stable life for himself and his younger brother. The boys’ mother has long been out of the picture, so since their father’s death, eight-year-old Billy has been staying with neighbors, Mr. Ransom and his daughter Sally who is the one who does the brunt of the work.

Emmett wants to sell the farm and, with Billy, leave Nebraska and drive to California where he’ll build a business buying and rehabbing old houses. Billy, a great reader, particularly of a book with capsule lives of real and fictional adventurers, wants them to take the Lincoln Highway to San Francisco.

Unfortunately, Emmett’s plans are derailed by two stowaways from prison: his friends Duchess and Wooley who have their own plans for Emmett and themselves, which involve heading in the opposite direction. Duchess is a scamp, sometimes a scoundrel, while Wooley appears to be on the spectrum, scion of a patrician New York family who never could measure up in that world.

What makes each character interesting, for me at least, is that they have each worked out their own moral code. Of course these codes vary wildly, and seeing how the young men try to stay true to their code and their vision creates suspense. The other interesting aspect is the strong ties of friendship between the three young men and how each comes up with what they think is the best way to help each other while helping themselves.

The book is narrated from multiple points of view, which lets us follow the different characters as they separate and come together. However, it makes it hard to feel invested in any of the characters. Initially I was ready to engage with Emmett and care about his quest, but began to lose interest when his story is sidelined.

If you are sensing echoes of Huckleberry Finn and The Odyssey, you’re not alone. These implicit—and sometimes explicit—references add texture to the story.

As in the Moscow book, some parts are simply unbelievable. Fantastic elements are all well and good, but when they pop up once you’re well into what purports to be a realistic book, it can feel like a betrayal.

My book club mostly found it a light read. We discussed what the book was about, perhaps the idea that we may think we’re in control, but we’re not, either because of destiny or chaos theory. Certainly it’s about human connections. We loved how the characters took care of each other, their tenderness and hopefulness. It’s essentially a “band of brothers” story.

There’s a jaunty tone to the book, even during episodes of danger and great violence, along with a sense that every risky move turns out okay. The combination made me feel that this was actually a middle grade book. A quick read despite its length, it’s a pleasant bit of fluff.

Do you have a favorite Amor Towles book?

The Magician, by Colm Tóibín

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Tóibín has long been one of my favorite authors. This new story of the life and times of author Thomas Mann rises to an even higher level. Born in a provincial German town in 1875, Mann navigates his birth family’s dynamics, formed by his conservative and proper father and his lovely and unpredictable Brazilian mother. His much older brother Heinrich is the favored one, expected to become a famous writer, so Thomas keeps his own ambitions to himself. He must also hide his homosexual desires.

Thomas becomes the most famous writer of his time, author of novels such as Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Death in Venice. Winner of the Nobel Prize, his private life remains secret. In captivating prose, Tóibín unravels these secrets, detailing the life of his family—his unruly children, his abiding marriage to Katia, daughter of a wealthy Jewish family—and the times in which they live—the Great War, the rise of Hitler, the Second World War, the Cold War.

Although written in close third person point of view, Tóibín adopts an authorial voice that conveys Mann’s personality: deliberate, insightful, alert to nuances of character. And each character in this story is multi-faceted, complex and contradictory, a combination of flaws and gifts.

What I love most is the way Tóibín enters the mind of Mann the writer, understanding the workings of inspiration, drudgery, and fame as only someone who has experienced it themselves can truly understand. For example, in one section, Thomas’s mind wanders as he listens to a performance of Beethoven’s Opus 132 quartet.

There were two men that he did not become and he might make a book from them if he could conjure up their spirits properly. One was himself without his talent, without his ambition, but with the same sensibility . . . A man, all conscience, who would have stayed in Germany even as Germany became barbaric, living a fearful life as an internal exile.

The other man was someone who did not know caution, whose imagination was as fiery and uncompromising as his sexual appetite, a many who destroyed those who loved him . . . A man who had been brushed by demons . . .

What would happen if these two men met? What energy would then emerge? What sort of book would that be? . . .

As the players drew near the final stretch, he felt the excitement of having been taken out of time and also a resolve that on this occasion the thoughts and ideas that came to him would mean something, would fill a space that he had been quietly creating.

Tóibín subtly gives us the experience of a writer’s children feeling abandoned in favor of the work, of friends and family feeling betrayed at his using details from their lives, of himself becoming a pawn in other people’s machinations.

I think this has become my new favorite book by Tóibín. Whether you are a fan of Thomas Mann’s writing or not, there is much to enjoy in this brilliant evocation of a writer’s life, of a German and part-Jewish family during this fraught period of history, and of the mysterious process of creation.

What is your favorite book by Colm Tóibín?

The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett

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I played hooky today, lured by the beautiful weather to work in the garden instead of writing the blog post I’d planned.

As I dug in the dirt, I was reminded, as I always am this time of year, of this wonderful children’s book. Ten-year-old Mary Lennox, orphaned by a cholera epidemic in India where she lived with her parents, is sent to Yorkshire to live with her cantankerous uncle in his gloomy house on the moors. There is a walled garden that has been locked and hidden ever since her aunt’s death.

Spoilt and headstrong Mary is miserable until she meets Dickon, 12-year-old brother of Mary’s maid. He teaches her about the wild things on the moors and gardening as well. The two search for the hidden garden by day, but at night Mary hear strange cries.

I first learned about the book when Miss Lewis, my fourth grade teacher, began reading it to us. Unfortunately, she passed away shortly into the term, and the substitute who took her place was not interested in reading us the rest of the book. I knew even then that librarians were the smartest people on earth, and sure enough, the woman at my neighborhood branch recognised my description and found the book for me.

Little did I know then that it would change everything for me, making me a gardener for life. Not only have I put in a garden everywhere I’ve lived, but my first overseas trip was to Yorkshire. Of course.

Burnett’s book is one of nine that I can point to as having made me the person I am today. Three I read as a child; three as a teenager, and three as an adult. While every book I read changes me to some extent, these books shaped my philosophy, my values, and my identity.

I hope that when a day is this gorgeous you, too, set aside your to-do lists and go outside. Listen to the birds. Dig in the dirt. Find or make your own secret garden.

What book changed your life?

Miss Benson’s Beetle, by Rachel Joyce

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London in 1950 is still recovering from World War II, with food rationed, ruined buildings being cleared, another generation of men wiped out, and women chucked out of their wartime jobs. Middle-aged spinster Margery Benson finally cracks and quits her job teaching domestic science in an elementary school with out-of-control children. She decides to set out on the adventure of a lifetime: an expedition to New Caledonia to find a mythical golden beetle.

She became fascinated with the golden beetle in 1914 when she was 10, and her father showed her a book of unknown creatures, meaning those referenced in ancient books but not yet found in real life. Later she met an entomologist at the Natural History Museum who taught her about beetles and collecting, making her long for the kind of journey she now has the training for.

Advertising for a French-speaking assistant, Margery gets only four responses, one an ex-POW still suffering from physical and psychological wounds, and two women who drop out, leaving her with the most unlikely assistant of all. Enid Pretty is a bleached blond woman in a pink suit and pompom sandals who never stops talking. Her French is limited to a mangled bonjour; her knowledge of entomology is nil, and she has no passport.

With much finagling and last-minute surprises, the odd couple manages to make it onto the ship to New Patagonia. Margery is not sure she can bear even one day in Enid’s company, much less weeks on the boat and months in the field. What she doesn’t know is that they are being followed by Enid’s shady past and the ex-POW who believes he should be leading the mission.

This book was the vacation I didn’t know I needed. Sure, there were moments that strained my credulity, but I was happy to go along for the ride.

Much as I enjoyed the scene setting, whether in a crowded ship stateroom, a British consulate tea party, or a remote jungle village, what fascinated me most was how the author managed to bring together the most incongruous elements. We have a dangerous adventure that’s also a madcap comedy. We have a woman with no credentials trying to mount an independent scientific mission, while beset with lost luggage, visas held up by recalcitrant bureaucrats, and tropical illnesses. Most of all, we have an unlikely friendship that grows organically throughout the book.

I also appreciated the way the author respects the voice of even the minor characters, such as the wife of the consul and the mousy woman who stands up to her, the French police and the native storeowner, not to mention the ex-POW himself. These could easily have been sketched in as stock characters, but Joyce presents them with care and insight.

If you’re looking for a break, join Margery and Enid on the adventure of a lifetime. You’ll find thrills and chills and a lot of laughs.

What books do you read when you want a virtual vacation?