Uncategorized

Atwood is best known for her novels such as Alias, Grace and The Handmaid's Tale, but it is her poetry that I have most valued. She writes in clear, compelling language, yet each poem contains a moment of surprise, of opening out into something beyond what I thought I understood. These revelatory connections and enlightenment—moments of being as Virginia Woolf called them, the leaping poetry Robert Bly described his book of that name—are what I look for in poetry. And what she refers to in “Poetry reading” in this volume, a description of a “well-known poet — ransacking his innards”. Understanding his compulsion, why he is not a bricklayer or dentist (“Hard-shelled. Impervious.”), detecting the craft behind the emotion, she is still surprised and struck.

Today poets are sometimes urged to make a single narrative of their poetry collection. Atwood has said that she writes individual poems, not volumes. She does not look ahead to how they might work together. I find the process of assembling a manuscript fascinating, entranced by how a poem changes when you set it next to another. Here, the book is divided into five sections. The first has to do with childhood and family; the second with the role of the poet, a theme she has come back to in several volumes. Writing in the turbulent second half of the 20th century, she has addressed political concerns while denying that the writer has a responsibility to society: “Books don't change the world.”

Yet she is still negotiating this relationship, and the poems of the third section address the wrongs of our society without the biting anger of True Stories but rather the insight of age. In “White Cotton T-Shirt” she remembers being a carefree teen-ager, saying “Ignorance makes all things clean. / Our knowledge weighs us down. We want it gone” yet goes on to write about Joan of Arc and war veterans who have kept “a hoard of buttons cut from corpses / as souvenirs”. Her writing has been called Northern Gothic and there are plenty of deliciously terrible images here. This is, after all, the woman who said that Grimm's Fairy Tales was the most influential book she ever read.

The fourth section seems almost a conversation with the preceding two sections. In poems such as “Enough of these discouragements, she defends the horrors she plumbs. “You wanted fire” she says. In “Another Visit to the Oracle” she says:

What would you prefer?

You'd like me to amuse you?

Do some jigs, or pranks? . . .

That's not what I do.

What I do: I see

in darkness. I see

darkness. I see you.

The last section reminds me that the poems in this 2007 book are those of a woman in her late 60s. Having addressed the horrors and dangers of our world, the loss of childhood and innocence, Atwood gives us the consolations of age, though slyly comparing them to the band on the Titanic in “Boat Song”. She talks of hearing “the man you love / talking to himself in the next room” and, listening, we are given the sense of what it means to share so long a life.

In Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, Atwood wrote: “Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light.” This is what she has done for me, discovered my fears and secret joys and brought them out to the light.

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. The jibes are at himself; he admits to feeling competitive about the age he first woke to death-awareness (a moment Charles du Bos called le réveil mortel): thirteen or fourteen to his friend G.‘s ridiculously early age of four “(four! you bastard!)”. Throughout the book, Barnes contrasts his own approach as a novelist to questions about death and what comfort may be derived from various sources with those of his brother who is a philosopher. Their paths diverged at an early age, which Barnes attributes to his brother being bottle-fed, unlike himself. He goes on to turn this assumption, as with others in this fascinating book, on its head, pulling it apart to try to discover the truth of the matter.

Barnes also looks at how other novelists, philosophers, composers, and so on who are brooders about death make of these questions. He wonders if we would wish to be conscious during our dying, citing Roy Porter who did “‘Because, you know, you'd just be missing out on something otherwise.'” Jules Renard, whom Barnes calls “one of my dead, French, non-blood relatives”, famous for a novel set in his native village of Chitry, experienced three deaths in the space of twelve years: his father's suicide, his brother's sudden collapse while at work, and his mother's drowning in a well, which may have been an accident or another suicide. At his brother's gravesite, Renard notices a fat worm on the edge of the grave seeming to be celebrating. He says, “‘All I feel is a kind of anger at death and its imbecile tricks.'”

That worm returns near the end of the book as Barnes stands over the Renard family grave. This return to certain images and ideas helps to tie together what is essentially a long essay. Barnes hews closely to his main idea—how can we come to terms with our inevitable end?—but the little excursions are what make the book delightful. At one point, he visits the graves of other non-blood relatives. In a cemetery in Deauville, he uses his rental car keys to clear the lichen from the gravestone, but the spacing of the letters is a bit odd, so the name he actually reveals is FORD MAD OXFORD. His graveyard visits lead Barnes to meditate about some reader perhaps cleaning Barnes's own tombstone one day, and to examine what comfort may be drawn from the ongoing life of books, one's creations. Cold comfort, he concludes, citing once-famous authors who have fallen out of fashion and the likely demise of physical books in our online world. He deals similarly with other proposed panaceas: religion, release from pain, the need to make room for others, children and genetic immortality, the famous bird from medieval poetry that flies into a lighted hall and then out of it again.

Barnes is amusing on the subject of last words, admiringly citing an otherwise undistinguished teacher who had decided to say simply, “Damn!” However, he goes on to dash cold water on the most gloriously planned exit lines by describing the reality of the person's final hours. I recently said of a friend that he made a good death, meaning that on his last day he displayed a dignity and courage I'd not expected from him, or from anyone for that matter. In his shoes, or hospital gown rather, I'd have been curled up against the bed's bars howling.

Fear of death—my own death—has never absorbed much of my attention. I've certainly worried about running out of time to do the things I want to do. And feared the possibility of dementia. But a long time ago, before I was even out of my teens and long before starting to study Eastern religions, I made the decision to live every day and as a result don't feel that I've missed out on anything.

Even without sharing Barnes's preoccupation, though, I found the book fascinating enough to tear through it in just a few days. The primary ideas I will take away from this book are his final remarks on narrative and memory.

I'd heard good things about this series featuring Dr. Siri, the 74-year-old National Coroner of Laos. Set in the late 1970s, the story provides a portrait of life in the new People's Democratic Republic of Laos and its uneasy relationship with its neighbors' new regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia. This historical and political background, though important, is sketched in briefly, a sentence here and there, barely discernible in the flow of the story in which Dr. Siri is called in on three related murders, young women who have been impaled by curiously sharpened épées.

Cotterill shows a Laos that seems less repressive than my preconceptions. Dr. Siri and his old friend, Civilai, carry on amusingly about the absurdities of the bureaucracy without fear of repercussions. They even feel safe enough to make fun of and try to undermine the applications for hero status which they have been invited to submit. Though the serious clerk does pull them up sharp with her own remarks, there are no threats or reprisals.

My favorite parts of the story are these conversations between the two friends, many at the cigarette and alcohol stand behind the market whose proprietor is called Two Thumbs because both of his thumbs are on one hand. When Civilai is asked to go on a diplomatic mission to Cambodia, supposedly just a public relations jaunt, he nominates his friend Siri as his companion. Siri agrees, remembering happy days in Phnom Penh with his first wife, Boua. He assumes his investigation will be wrapped up by then, even though Inspector Phosy seems set on the wrong suspect.

I found the investigation fascinating, with unexpected twists and turns complicated by the unfamiliar (to me) culture. I also liked that in the rush of the story, Cotterill found time for small descriptions that evoke the scenes and the way of life, such as the two-story spirit house constructed by Siri's wife Daeng. The upstairs is for the ancestors, protected with buddhas, incense, and wooden elephants, while the downstairs is for the phaphoom, spirits displaced from the land, their consumer longings appeased by doll furniture, toy tv and miniature Mercedes Benz. The rainy season has stayed beyond its limits, as though to make up for the previous year's drought, and as the story gathers speed we see rain finally begin to seep into a corner of the morgue where Siri's assistants, Nurse Dtui and Geung, construct a dam of sandbags. This corner eventually becomes a pond with a couple of water lilies.

Cotterill handles the mix of humor and gravity beautifully. Civilai, Phosy, Daeng, Dtui, Geung and other characters emerge as people interesting in themselves. Less successful to my mind were the interspersed scenes of a future or past situation involving Dr. Siri. Still, there was much to interest me, and I'll certainly look for more in the series.

In this astounding novel, we are given 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 only indirectly, through the stories that are told to young Quentin Compson. About to leave for Harvard, Quentin endures the wisteria-scented heat of September listening to Miss Rosa Coldfield, whose sister married Sutpen and bore him two children, and his father, whose own father had been Sutpen's only friend. Once in the deadly cold of his Harvard dorm, Quentin and his roommate Shreve, a milk-fed Canadian encountering the twisted kudzu of the South for the first time, continue to try to wrestle the bits of story into a narrative that makes sense.

Each new fragment reveals and occludes the few bare facts, suggesting motives and rationales for everyone involved. New facts shift the pattern in a kaleidoscope whirl. Faulkner has said that no one character has the true story, but the reader can come to it. In last week's blog, I mentioned the impossibility of truly knowing someone's life. Here, where we do not hear from Sutpen himself, we find a mosaic assembled from what these others say about him which may turn out to be the most truthful way to get at the reality of another person and what is in his or her heart.

Faulkner describes language as “that meager and fragile thread . . . by which the little surface corners and edges of men's secret and solitary lives may be joined for an instant now and then before sinking back into the darkness where the spirit cried for the first time and was not heard and will cry for the last time and will not be heard then either.”

I believe this is true, that what binds us together is language and the stories that we tell.

It is almost impossible for me to read Faulkner with my writer's glasses on. This is my third time reading this particular novel, maybe my fourth. Each time (after the first) I thought Okay, now I'll really pay attention. And each time I've gotten swept up again in the dramatic flood of his language: a dizzying, poetic, mad rush of words. I binged on Faulkner as a teen, reading everything I could lay my hands on. I fell into his Yoknapatawpha County as into an alternate world and traced the lineages of the Compson, Sartoris and Snopes families through various novels and stories. I got drunk on his language, his sentences that went on and on yet made perfect sense and could not be any shorter.

Yet in an earlier reading, I managed to recognise that Sutpen is an avatar for the South, the old South of plantations and slavery that seceded from the U.S. and thus instigated the Civil War. Sutpen has that combination of hubris, courage, innocence, and greed; he believes that it is fine to use other people heartlessly in order to reach his own ends. And what trips him up is the fatal flaw that destroyed that South and continues to be the original sin that this country cannot get past.

And I'd marked what he said about women, as Rosa says: “I waited not for light but for that doom which we call female victory which is: endure and endure, without rhyme or reason or hope of reward—and then endure.”

In this reading I was taken with the structure of the book. Revelations are carefully meted out. The scene of Sutpen's son Henry in school with the dandy, Charles Bon, at the beginning is echoed by Quentin and Shreve at the end. Sutpen as a barefoot child is turned away from the front door of a mansion, setting in action his long quest, and then he himself turns a young man away—figuratively—by not acknowledging him as his son.

Or did he? I still don't know the truth of it. Yes, through all the bits and pieces I can see a narrative that makes sense, but I don't know that it is true. It is only what I'm told.

I've waited a couple of weeks to write about this book, but my thoughts still haven't settled. They are like the birds at the feeder, startling up at the slightest shadow into a flurry of wings. Ondaatje's books always give me plenty to think about, and this one is no exception.

The first part is about Anna and Claire, two teenaged sisters who live on a farm in Northern California with their father and a young man named Coop. The father had brought Coop from the neighboring farm to help with the work and learn to be a farmer after Coop's family was murdered. Older than the girls, Coop moves out to and restores the cabin that the girls' grandfather had built when he first came to stake his claim. The story moves between the three young people, circling around the incidents and stories that make up their past.

Details bring their lives into vivid focus: “Coop, who with his confidence would sweep a hay bale over his shoulder and walk to the barn lighting a cigarette with his free hand.” And “Sometimes Claire and I would come down the hill with the car lights turned off in complete blackness. Or we would climb from our bedroom window onto the skirt of the roof and lie flat on our backs on the large table-rock, still warm from the day, and talk and sing into the night. We counted out seconds between meteor showers slipping horizontal across the heavens.”

Later sections follow Anna, Claire and Coop as they move out into the world, scattered by an act of violence. Only Claire returns regularly from her job in San Francisco to visit her father and ride the high ridges of the farm. Coop has become a gambler, while Anna is in France, researching the life of a nearly-forgotten poet, Lucien Segura. She lives in his now-empty house and meets a young Romany named Rafael who once knew the author.

There are lovely structural parallels in the story. Rafael, Segura, and the three young people all are affected by fathers and stepfathers, their crafts and mistakes and disappearances. Segura's empty house echoes the grandfather's abandoned cabin and the deserted town of Allensworth in Southern California which Anna stops in during her flight from her father. The Central Plain of California, stark and barren, through which she travels was once a sea of flowers, like the depression in Segura's lawn that was once a pond. The story moves in and out of the past, setting up reflections and remnants.

Anna walks Segura's paths, swims in his stream, and sits at his blue table translating his work. She learns that she can hide in art, take refuge in the third person. I love the moment when she falls in love with the task, listening to Segura read some of his work on an old cylinder. “There was a sweet shadow and hesitance in Segura. it was like a ruined love, and it was familiar to me.” It reminded me of a recent conversation with my friend, Steve, when he told me of a casual comment that made him want to know more, and thus set him on his life's work. It also reminded me of a recent Writer's Almanac segment about Stephen Ambrose and how a professor's comment that a research paper “would add to the sum of the world's knowledge” changed his life.

What I find myself returning to again and again is Anna's quixotic effort to capture and preserve the past, Segura's past. 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. Marty introduced me to a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “People”, which has these lines: “To each his world is private . . . In any man who dies there dies with him / his first snow and kiss and fight / it goes with him . . Not people die but worlds die in them.”

The last part of the book gives us what Anna will never know: Segura's story. We find out why he left his family to come alone to the house where she sits, how Rafael met him, and why the blue table is important. Whole peoples have gone, whole towns deserted or drowned. We wonder about the Anasazi, the Mayans, the Minoans. We read about Colette or Wague and wonder What was it like to be you? The birds rise up again and then resettle in a different pattern.

I like reading books set in familiar places, but can also be entranced by those set in places where I'd like to go. Cara Black's mysteries featuring Aimee Leduc as a detective who mostly works computer security are set in Paris, a place that is high on my bucket list. Leduc is assisted by René Friant, only four feet tall, but dapper and wise.

On the very first page, as Leduc struggles to finish a system upgrade within the deadline, this story is launched by a phone call. A woman's voice begs her to go down to the courtyard, promising that it will only be for a few hours. When Leduc, armed with her Beretta carefully explores the courtyard, she finds a baby hidden behind the garbage containers. And we're off into a whirl of danger made even more frenetic by her attempts to care for the baby.

Black draws even the most minor of characters with a fine brush, such as the homeless man, Jules, with whom she takes refuge, or Jean Caplan who owns a dusty second-hand shop and tries to watch out for and feed Helene, an elderly woman whose life is packed into shopping bags. Black captures both the young and rebellious heir to a long-gone Polish monarchy and his uncle, an elderly Count hanging onto his memories, avoiding stereotypes and bring them both alive with small details and surprising inconsistencies.

Where Black really shines, or at least what delights me most are her descriptions of Paris, the back streets and hidden courtyards, the stones lining the Seine, the tunnels below. Leduc lives on the Ile Saint-Louis, a small island in the middle of the river, originally a “feudal island fortress”, now only eight blocks long and three blocks wide whose inhabitants refer to the rest of Paris as “the Continent”. Black shades the people and places with subtle references to the city's past. The faded aristocrats and the down-and-out both suffer the long reach of tragedy.

This is yet another excellent entry in the series: smart, fast-paced and full of heart. I highly recommend it.

I hadn't read anything of Styron's since Sophie's Choice but picked this up because I was spending a week in the Tidewater area of Virginia. The three stories making up the book are linked by having a common protagonist, Paul Whitehead. Set during the Depression and World War II, the stories present Paul's memories, based, as the Author's Note tells us, on Styron's own experiences. The tone of the stories avoids nostalgia and sentiment, giving us the boy's experiences unmediated by the experience of age.

The third story, which provides the name of the collection, is a masterpiece. On the morning in question, a brutally hot one, Paul is awakened at 1 a.m. by his mother's scream. In the last stages of cancer, her pain cannot be mitigated even by the morphine delivered by the night nurse. Forgotten, Paul lingers around the edges of the house where his mother is dying, overhearing his father's increasingly despairing conversations, taking comfort from the maid, Flo, who is legendary in the town for her crankiness, and examining his own memories of his parents arguing.

If I were teaching a class on the short story, I would have the students study this one carefully. It succeeds on all levels. The word choice reflects the vocabulary of a thirteen-year-old boy who likes to read, as we know from the books in his room. The things that he thinks about and notices—his guilt over drinking directly out of the water bottle in the refrigerator, the rankness of the chicken necks boys are using to catch crabs, his worry over what the changes in his body mean—are also typical and beautifully rendered in sentences that ache with clarity and emotion.

The organization of the story amazes me, the way answers are given and withheld, the echoes and repetitions, the gentle foreshadowing, the voices of the people in his world. Gruff Mr. Quigley docks Paul's pay for every soda and harangues Ralph, the store drudge, yet shows his compassionate side first to Ralph and later to Paul. Flo listens to radio preachers in the night and tries to comfort Paul with her faith, while later attempts by the Presbyterian minister and his wife to comfort Paul's father, a stalwart of the church, draw only a shocking contempt for a god who could allow such pain. The headlines of approaching war on the papers Paul delivers are echoed later as he trudges the street by the Flying Fortresses from the Army base down the road flying over him. And these signs of war are themselves premonitions of the death and grief to come.

The story takes on even more meaning when set against the other stories in the book. In the first story, “Love Day”, Paul is 20 and serving as a platoon leader in the Pacific. As he and his shipmates fret about when they will actually join the assault on Okinawa, Paul recalls an incident from childhood when their Oldsmobile broke down near a peanut field, and his father, although an engineer helping to build warships, is unable to fix it. Paul's remarks on a story in The Saturday Evening Post he's reading about a possible Japanese invasion earn him a tongue-lashing from his mother who loves the Japanese culture and upbraids him for reading trashy, scare-mongering stories. His father, who never raises his voice, a gentle poet somehow caught up in building war machines, snaps and tells her not to be such a fool, asking what she thinks he does all day, what she thinks the Flying Fortresses are that fly overhead every Sunday.

In the second story, “Shadrach”, Paul is ten and caught up with a family called the Dabneys, who have come down in the world, the father a bootlegger and the mother “a huge sweaty generous breadloaf of a woman”. An only child, he loves their “sheer teeming multitude” of seven children and loud eccentric life. One day, an ancient and emaciated black man turns up, Shadrach, who has walked from Alabama to die on Dabney land, 75 years after Mr. Dabney's great-grandfather sold him. Through dissolute generations since, the once-proud plantation has been reduced to a dilapidated box home made of concrete blocks.The struggling family nevertheless tries to honor the wishes of this all too human (and rank) reminder of their past.

The past and how it informs our present is one of the threads brought out by the proximity of these stories, as is the expectation of war, the small wars with those around us and the mechanized war of nations. But mostly the stories are about what it means to be a man, trying to protect your family and honor your legacy, taking refuge from emotion in gruffness and in words. This last reminds me of Ian McEwan's Solar which was also partially about hiding from emotion in words. McEwan's trademark of having some violent event intrude on normal life and set the story in motion seemed to me contrived after Styron's remarkable stories of the chaos that can upend our small and private lives.

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.

The Jolly Tinker, Jeff Warner
Mandalay, Jeff Warner
The Bonny Bay Of Biscay-O, Jeff Warner
Across The Blue Mountains, Suzannah & Georgia Rose
Hallowell, Suzannah & Georgia Rose
Travelers Prayer, Suzannah & Georgia Rose
Narrow Space, Suzannah Park & Nathan Morrison
Darlin' Corey, Suzannah Park & Nathan Morrison
Amelia , Suzannah Park & Nathan Morrison
Man Of Constant Sorrow, Suzannah Park & Nathan Morrison
Three Pieces By O'Carolan: The Lamentation of Owen Roe O'Neill / Lord Inchiquin / Mrs. Power, John Renbourn
4×32 Strathspeys – Young Ivercauld's / Appin House / Gordon Castle / Bonnie Beatons, Waverley Station
Arran Boat/Paddy Fahey's/Devlin's/Bagdad Bully, Alexander Mitchell
Monongahela Sal, The NewLanders
Hard Times, The NewLanders
Run, Johnny Run, The NewLanders
There'll Be Some Changes Made, House Top
Do I Worry, House Top
What'll I Do, House Top
Over the Rainbow, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole
True Life Near , Craig Taborn
Diamond Turning Dream, Craig Taborn
Neverland, Craig Taborn
Spirit Hard Knock, Craig Taborn
Forgetful, Craig Taborn
Bird on a Wire , Jennifer Warnes
Total Eclipse of the Heart, Bonnie Tyler
Rocky Beaches, Ken Kolodner, Brad Kolodner
Snow Drop, Ken Kolodner, Brad Kolodner
Bethany Beach, Ken Kolodner, Brad Kolodner
Needle Case, Ken Kolodner, Brad Kolodner
Southern Cross, Ken Kolodner, Brad Kolodner
The Cordwainer's March/Mick Walsh's/Road To Banff, Ken Kolodner & Elke Baker
Purple Lillies, Ken Kolodner & Elke Baker
Booth Shot Lincoln/Moneymusk, Ken Kolodner & Elke Baker
Shebeg An Sheemor, Happy Traum
Delia's Gone, Happy Traum
White Oak Mountain / Kitchen Girl, Sally Rogers
Planxty Fanny Power, Sally Rogers

This has been an odd year for me. I read fewer books than usual, but among them are some that will go on the best-of-a-lifetime list.

1. To the End of the Land, by David Grossman

This is one of the most deeply moving books I’ve ever read and it has stayed with me long after I closed the cover. No other fiction I’ve read comes close to capturing as this book does what it means to be a parent or what it means to belong to a land.

2. Precious Bane, by Mary Webb

First published in 1926, Precious Bane is a novel about life in a village in the Ellesmere district of Shropshire. It captures the sumptuous beauty of rural life in the pre-industrial past but also the superstition, brutality and terror, thus providing a realistic picture of what is often sentimentalised as Merrie England.

3. In the Temple of a Patient God, by Bejan Matur

Matur’s poems ache with power. Her words and images barely control the deep, rumbling force that threatens to explode in blinding light. A Kurdish Alevi from Southeastern Turkey, she draws on that dark heritage of war and defeat and loss and exile to create the poems in this collection.

4. Winter's Bone, by Daniel Woodrell

Everyone talked about the film, but the book is better. Woodrell’s economical prose captures life in this remote valley in the Ozarks without sentimental hand-wringing, with just the calm clarity of purpose that moves sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly through her day.

5. The Forest of Sure Things, Poems by Megan Snyder-Camp

I ended up reading this collection four times. The first time I just enjoyed the words, the sound of them, the flow. The second time I read for images, lingering over each poem and letting resonances collect in the space between them. The third time I read for meaning. I let everything go for my fourth reading, allowing words, images, and meaning to merge into an extraordinary experience.

6. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

In compelling prose, Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman from rural Virginia, who died of cancer in 1951 in Johns Hopkins Hospital. Cells harvested from her tumor, in accordance with the standard practice of the time, became the first cells that could be grown in a laboratory, a huge advance for medicine because they enabled researchers to run tests in laboratories instead of on live people. Yet Henrietta’s family knew nothing of the continued existence of her cells nor of the contributions to society they enabled.

7. Journey from the North: Autobiography of Storm Jameson

In her long life (1891-1986), Jameson wrote over 45 novels and served as President of the London center of the P.E.N., the first woman to do so. This narrative captures the vitality of life as we live it: a jumble from beginning to end, sprinkled with mistakes, false starts, and moments of unreasoning joy.

8. The Solace of Leaving Early, by Haven Kimmel

Langston Braverman has come home to her small town of Haddington, Indiana, simply walking out of her PhD orals and abandoning that life and all its dreams. She takes refuge in the hot attic of her parents’ home where she imagines that she is writing a novel. Or maybe an epic sonnet sequence. In reality she is mostly sleeping and contemplating the wreck of her life. I found the book smart and funny and unexpected.

9. Breaker, by Sue Sinclair

This is the third book of poetry from the Toronto-based Sinclair, though the first one I’ve read. Or rather, immersed myself in, since I’ve read and reread it, set the book aside for a few months, and read it again. Poets are often advised to go deeper, to make space for more profound meaning to emerge. Sinclair’s poems make me look at the things of this world in a new way.

10. Searching for Caleb, by Anne Tyler

In discussing The Help, I said that the relationship between domestic help and their employers was more complicated than Stockton’s book indicated. For a more nuanced view, I went back to this Anne Tyler novel from 1975. While the relationship between the Pecks and their long-time maid Sulie is a very small part of the story, it is a crucial one and Tyler nails it. In just a couple of scenes she captures the conflicting emotions that drive their behavior towards each other. It is a privilege to read this woman’s writing.

11. Sketches from a Hunter's Album, by Ivan Turgenev

Beautiful descriptions, fascinating characters, and a realistic picture of the plight of the Russian peasants just prior to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.

12. The Most Dangerous Thing, by Laura Lippman

The death of Gordon “Go-Go” Halloran brings together four people who had been inseparable for a few years in the late 1970s but have since lost touch. Dickeyville, where the story is set, is a most peculiar neighborhood even in a city known for its colorful neighborhoods. The quality of memories, individual and shared, and the use to which we put them are always concerns of Lippman’s, but here there is also the idea of venturing out of the everyday world into woods where, as in a fairy tale, anything can happen.

I subscribe to a fair number of literary magazines, far more than I can read, to be honest. Mostly I cycle around, subscribing to different ones, but there are a couple of standards that I'm not willing to give up, even for a year. One of these is The Sun.

Proudly ad-free, The Sun always repays my attention with excellent writing and strong insights. It starts with an interview, which I'm sometimes tempted to skip over it, but I've learned that there are always at least a few nuggets that will make me sit up and pay attention. The rest of the magazine is full of strong, personal stories. Most are nonfiction, but one or two are fiction. There are a couple of poems, lots of striking black and white photos, and a section called Reader's Write, where readers send in short pieces on a particular topic.

I'm choosing one recent issue to discuss—November 2011—because it seemed particularly outstanding to me. The cover is a gorgeous photo by Gary Harwood taken at a dance competition. Shot from above, one woman in perfect focus appears to be standing still,looking up, her skirt a mandala around her, while other dancers are a spinning blur. Her expression outdoes the Mona Lisa as she stares into your eyes with an inscrutable expression.

The interview with Michael Meade centers on the need for stories. He says that “We have a seeded self that begins to germinate at birth. Our true goal in life is to become that self.” He talks about working with a group of young people, telling them stories about initiations and young people “finding their souls.” A dance was to follow his talk and he told them, “‘understand who you are in the midst of the dance. No one else is dancing the same way you are. So be in the big dance of life, but also be yourself in the big dance.'” Then when the music started, the young people started dancing up to him saying “‘I'm showing you who I am.'” Gave me chills.

I liked the poem “Loving a Woman” by Ellen Bass. In just a few lines, she recreates a day and places me right in it. She uses unexpected words and strong verbs: “The day was warm, / a thrum of insects, budding of cells, / the fat leaves opening their pores . . .” I felt the water of the stream washing over me and felt the sun “pouring into the mouths / of the leaves as they stirred . . .”

My favorite piece is by Brian Doyle, someone who turns up regularly in these pages. “Elson Habib, Playing White, Ponders His First Move” starts with Elson considering the queen's pawn and remembering his grandfather's advice. And from there, the middle of the first sentence until the end, we are plunged into the voice of the grandfather, talking to the child Elson as they play. The grandfather talks about pawns and sly bishops, describing people he has played such as a man from Alexandria who “would sacrifice pawns on purpose sometimes to set himself an imbroglio.” He is a romantic, saying “Imagination is the great secret of chess, not experience.” Doyle stays in character beautifully as the old man imparts life-lessons slant-wise, talking about slurping tea from a saucer and light that falls like golden dust. Doyle also uses repetition effectively, repeating a phrase just often enough to add depth to the character.

Another piece, excerpted from Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations reminds me that people have a tendency to laziness and timidity. “In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience — why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality . . . We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence . . we want to be the true helmsman of this existence.” But he adds that “it is a painful and dangerous undertaking thus to tunnel into oneself.”

The essays, being true, often plumb these dangerous depths, prompting some readers to complain in letters to the editor that the magazine is too dark. One in this issue hurt me to read, but I was glad I did. “Baby Lollipops” by Jaquira Diaz, is about a dead toddler in the local news when Diaz was a young girl just after her parents divorced. At first she and her little sister live with her father and his mother, but then they are stolen by their mother, a drug addict. Diaz can't stop thinking about the toddler, who had apparently been killed by his mother. “We are supposed to love our mothers. We are supposed to trust them and need them and miss them when they're gone. But what if that same person,the one who's supposed to love you more than anyone else in the world, the one who's supposed to protect you, is also the one who hurts you the most?” I thought of the lovely essay my friend Fernando Quijano wrote about his mother; it too is about how we find and create a way to go on and still see beauty and still be able to love.

That's why I keep reading this magazine. Try it. Just one issue and you'll be hooked.