This, That, and a Booklist . . . What I Read in February. . .

We were delighted this weekend to be able to see all our local kids and grandkids in person — the new protocols allow outside, physically distanced gatherings of up to ten people (we’re asked to keep those ten consistent).

We walked through a forested city park with these two, finding caterpillars and snails, sketching the ducks in the pond, finding the least squelchy path alongside a stream, identifying native shrubs and admiring their blooms. . . Balm to my spirit. . . .

At the same time we learned that our ex-pats in Rome are going back into strict lockdown again, for three weeks. Still sorting all the mixed emotions of these strangely turbulent days when we’re buffeted between hope and frustration and resignation.  Not at all clear when we will be able to see that crew again. A social media friend posted a phrase this morning from her Italian language class: allenamento intensivo alla pazienza. My rough translation would be “intensive training in patience,” a phrase that effectively sums up so much of this last year. And we’re obviously not done yet.

So we find the distractions we can, and we do our best. For me, that means daily walking in as many directions as I can find. Come back later this week and I’ll take you along to visit a new sculpture along a very attractive waterfront walk. Here’s a quick peek — the sculpture’s red; can you see it?

I also distract myself by reading, as you probably already know. Since many of you seem to share this predilection, I’ve begun sharing my Reading Blog monthly summary posts right here, for those of you who prefer one-stop shopping ;-).  Personally, I have always loved the conversations and the small but committed community at Materfamilias Reads (browsing the comments all the way back, I see so many reader recommendations that I’ve benefited from), and I’d be happy to have you stop by, perhaps even subscribe. But I’ve been considering folding the two blogs back into one, hence this one-year trial of duplicate posts. Feel free to comment either here or there or not at all, obviously, as you wish.

And now, onto the books I read in February. . . Here are the titles, numbered as they appear in my handwritten Reading Journal:

8. Jane Smiley, Perestroika in Paris, contemporary fiction, fable/fairytale for adults, equestrian, Paris, talking animals

9. Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults, literary fiction, fiction in translation, Italy, Naples, coming-of-age, lives of girls and women, family, marriage

10. Clare Hunter, Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, memoir, creative-non-fiction, cultural history, sewing, embroidery, activism

11. Cécile Coulon, Une Bête au Paradis, contemporary fiction, French contemporary fiction, en français, love and disappointment, family generations, country/farm life,

12. Christobel Kent, A Secret Life, domestic thriller, set in contemporary London and suburbs

13. Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, memoir, self-help, winter, reflection, slowing down

14. Thomas King, Indians on Vacation, literary fiction, contemporary fiction, First Nations/Native American writer, European vacation, armchair travel with a twist, aging protagonist, longterm marriage

15. Elly Griffiths, The Lantern Men, mystery, female protagonist, feminist writer,  Ruth Galloway series, archaeology, academe, set in England

16. Anthony Horowitz, Moonflower Madness, mystery, meta-mystery, book-within-a-book, female protagonist, set in England

and one that I began, and then abandoned at five chapters, Jan-Philipp Sendker’s The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

 

And here are the pages from my Reading Journal with links to my Instagram posts:

It took me a while to get ’round to Jane Smiley’s Perestroika in Paris because I just wasn’t in the mood for what I thought would be a book about Russian politics in the City of Light. But when I noticed a few discerning readers delighting in it, I quickly put it on hold at the library and got an e-book version not long after — Turns out there is a “restructuring of economic and politic activity” — signalled by the name of an escaped race horse, Perestroika — but it takes place around three displaced animals who throw their lot together. . . .

If you’re skeptical about reading a novel featuring talking animals, let me remind you that Paris can make all magic seem entirely credible. . . (for other brilliant talking-animal novels set outside of Paris, may I suggest André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs; and for more magic-tinted Paris, have you read C.S. Richardson’s The Emperor of Paris?

Recommended!

Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults, which I borrowed from my daughter, to whom I’d given it for Christmas. Powerfully and uncomfortably intimate view of Giovanna’s parents, their marriage, the possibilities their lives suggest to her, in the voice of a just-pubescent girl confusedly fumbling her way to womanhood. Confusedly fumbling, but also increasingly determined, deliberate. . .

As in her Neapolitan quartet, Ferrante is uncannily revealing about the thoughts and feelings of girls and women, nearly microscopic in her vision, voicing phenomena we instantly recognize but rarely articulate or see articulated. As in the quartet, Naples is another character here, but a different Naples, higher up the hill, more educated, polished, and also beginning decades later.

I wrestled with the ending, found it unsettling. . . but finally, I find it oddly hopeful. Giovanna sets out her own terms. . . I’ll be curious to know what you think.

Also posted about this on Instagram 

Next up was Clare Hunter’s Threads of Life: A History of the World through the Eye of a Needle — a title which suggests a broader claim than this cultural-history/memoir can live up to. But Hunter takes us to medieval Europe, the United States (slaves and imprisoned suffragettes), rural China, Palestine, Africa, and traces the roles that needle, thread, and fabric have played in constructing and maintaining identity, remembering family, tribal, and national history, practicing political and social activism.

My IG posts on this include a particularly gripping passage about American suffragette history.

I thought perhaps I should try to write my entry for Cécile Coulon’s Une Bête au Paradis “en français,” since that’s the way I read this book.  But here’s my English version of what I was trying to say: “I love this book! A story of love and deception and disappointment. Of country life, of farming, of the earth, of small communities. Memory, history, geography, family (generations of it) tragedy. Almost mythic or like a Greek tragedy (She swallowed the spiders!).

If you read French, I recommend this. Beautifully written. moving.

Posted this photo on IG — I thought my latest pair of handknit socks went well with the cover.

And I posted the photo below there as well, with a few words about Christobel Kent’s A Secret Life.

I grabbed this one when I saw its shiny new cover displayed on the New Books shelf at our local library branch.  An entertaining domestic thriller that will keep you turning pages. Read my notes (below) and you’ll see I prefer Kent’s Sandro Cellini series, but I liked this well enough to recommend if you enjoy this genre. IG post here (check out Christobel Kent’s sweet comments here — I’m always impressed when an author takes the time to do this)

On the page above, I’ve given short shrift to Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. Perhaps that’s because I stretched its reading over this winter, perhaps it’s because I read as a purchased e-book, dipping in and out of as suited me, perhaps it’s because it’s such a gentle guide, both more and less than I’d expected. I posted briefly about it on Instagram and I found much of May’s meditation restorative and affirming. Still thinking about it, but more amorphously than is likely to be useful to you at the moment. I do think I will dip back into it in future winters or quiet and/or difficult times.

(the photo I posted on IG, along with a few words about my decades-long admiration for King and his writing)

And also on the page above, the start of my entry for Thomas King’s Indians on Vacation . . . continued below, after I share two passages which give you a sense of King’s humour and conversational style as well as a glimpse at his approach to storytelling (rooted in indigenous/tribal culture) — i.e. “You can’t tell a good story all at once”

And he is always working to subvert an expectation of “authenticity” in indigenous culture, a dangerous expectation which works to deny political status to indigenous people whose culture has evolved (as any living culture does), adapting to contemporary life. So Mimi gets the condensed version of Blackbird’s story — after all, the couple is in a hotel in Prague, not in a winter tipi where long, drawn-out stories were a distraction from the cold and dark outside.

Similarly, when Mimi first decides that she and Blackbird will begin collecting artifacts for their own “Crow bundle,” her mother, Bernie, offers a case of ballistic nylon, with a zipper, to hold the medicine bundle. To Mim’s objections that “a piece of elk hide” would be more appropriate, Bernie scoffs, “Sure. . . if this were the nineteenth century.”

And Bernie amplifies her reasoning: “Authentic is overdone. . . . Authentic is one of the ideas Whites use to hold us in place. It’s one of the ways we hold ourselves in place.”

(I love the last line of this page as well, Bernie’s wisdom: “Sometimes. . . starting is how we continue.”

The continuation of my journal notes

At the bottom of this journal page, I jotted the title and author of a book I began, was enjoying well enough (a young woman, a New York lawyer, has traveled to Burma in search of her father who disappeared years earlier and who might have returned to his native country).  It promises to be a love story that combines mystery and fable and exotic Oriental philosophy. . . and I guess that projection of Eurocentric ideas on an “Eastern country” doesn’t suit me, especially given the current situation in Myanmar.  So I gave myself permission not to finish.  It’s a very attractive book, though. . .

The end of February brought a few low-energy, tending-to-depressed days, and I was grateful for a message from the library that two mystery novel were awaiting me.

Elly Griffiths’ The Lantern Men has renewed my interest in her Ruth Galloway series, an interest that flagged a bit with the last volume.  IG post here

On the contrary, however, although I read to the end of Anthony Horowitz’s Moonflower Madness and found it entertaining throughout — even recommending his book to at least one other reader — I have decided not to read more of his work. As clever as his plotting undeniably is, I’m bothered by a lack of diversity in his characters. . . This lack makes his description of a certain Detective Chief Superintendent (much disliked by amateur detective Susan Ryeland)  — “angry eyes, his black skin, his muscular neck and shoulders” — stereotypically racist. In case you think I’m drawing conclusions too hastily, this is the third book I’ve read of Horowitz’s that makes this kind of link. And the fact that it took me three books — and I’m generally a pretty discerning reader — suggests the insidiousness of this kind of representation.

I’d prefer to read mystery novels that make room for wonderful characters like DS Winsome Jackman (in Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks’ series). . . Or Texas Ranger Darren Matthews in Attica Locke’s recent series. . . .

Over to you, now. Perhaps you’ve read some of my February books and want to add your thoughts. Perhaps you’ve read a book you think we should all know about, something we’d love, something to help us transition from Winter to Spring in this hemisphere or from Summer to Fall in the other. . . .

All comments welcome, as always.