What I've read over the last few months

Here's a list of the books I've read recently:

The Leftovers, by Tom Perrotta--I really enjoyed Perrotta's writing, and the idea was really original. I liked that he doesn't present easy answers to the dilemma he poses, just lets his characters experience the aftermath of his crazy set-up: that there has been a "rapture", and some of us have been left behind...

The Dovekeepers, by Alice Hoffman--I liked this better than I thought I would. It's the story of several women who experience the siege of Masada, in the first century CE. I was impressed with Hoffman's evocation of the historical period, and loved her depictions of the practices of women at this time.

Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck--I had read this years ago, and did not remember how good it was. Steinbeck was an amazing creator of characters, and portrays with humor and empathy the wonderfully flawed human beings who live on Cannery Row.

The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka--Haunting and poetic, this book was a surprise to me. Otsuka somehow makes the plural voice work, and though the reader doesn't get to know the characters individually, it somehow comes together as a sad, intimate portrait of the Japanese picture brides who came to California in the 1920s.

Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons--I had seen and enjoyed this movie years ago, so I wanted to read the book. A comic nod to Victorian novels, the adventures of Flora Poste as she sets about to better the lives of her shockingly backward distant cousins are sometimes laugh-out-loud funny.

The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides--A book group read the group was mixed on. Some beautifully written passages, some complaints about the plot. I liked the ending because it was a nod to Jane Austen, but no fairy tale.

The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson--Another arresting premise, about two kids who grew up in a family of performance artists, where they had to participate in their parents' sometimes disturbing stunts. I liked reading it as a giant metaphor for dysfunctional families, and I liked where the plot took me.

Blue Nights, by Joan Didion--Joan Didion's follow-up to her memoir of the year after her husband's sudden death, The Year of Magical Thinking, this raw memoir is about the death of her daughter, which she had to endure only two years later. I had to get over the idea that this would be a profoundly depressing read, but Didion's language overcomes the grimness of the subject matter, and her meditations on aging, motherhood, life and death are poetic.

The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach--Not really about baseball, thank goodness. More about college life, love and friendship. Another book group pick, which everyone liked.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky--(inspired by my 15-year-old son, who read it all in one day) A modern classic of troubled teendom and outsiderhood. This reminds me how much I hated being a teenager. That said, I'm glad my son read it and related to it.

St. Patrick's Day read

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, I'm beginning John Banville's novel The Sea. It's something I've wanted to read forever, not just because it won the Man Booker, but because so many people say Banville's writing is strange and beautiful.

Also, it's a stormy day here, and I think the book will fit my mood. Maybe I'll bake some soda bread and have some tea while I read.

The first line is pretty good: "They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide."

Hello again, and the 100 Best First Lines of Novels

So I quit blogging for the last six months or so, not for any terrible reason, but out of inertia. I guess I needed a break, and seem to have lost the urgency previously driving me to write about books. I've certainly still been reading books, and thinking about books--just not writing about them. But I miss my blogging friends, which are really the best thing to come out of blogging, for me, so I thought I would check back in and see everyone.

My wonderful book group just finished The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach, which we all enjoyed--much to the surprise of those who thought the novel was actually going to be about baseball. Unfortunately, at our meeting we did not pick a book to read next. If we don't pick right away, it tends to stymie us, and we send several hundred emails back and forth debating the potential pros and cons of many options. I think we have finally settled on Swamplandia, by Karen Russell. I hope so, as it's looking like an interesting novel.

I ran across this article about the 100 Best First Lines of Novels. There is nothing better than a clever or memorable first line in a novel, and this collection was fun to look through.

Number 2 on the list is probably my favorite: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813).

Five and six are favorites as well:

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. - Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

There are many other first lines I love on the list, as well as a bunch I didn't remember, or had never even heard of. Tell me some of your favorite first lines! Do you know any by heart?

Booking Through Thursday--In Public

Here's this week's Booking Through Thursday question:

Do you carry books with you when you’re out and about in the world?

And, do you ever try to hide the covers?

I do carry books with me, in my voluminous, Hermione Granger-style purse. Either that or I carry my iPad, which always has a book or two on it. I hate to be without reading material in case I get stuck somewhere, in a doctor's office, waiting for someone to show up, on a runway, whatever.

I never try to hide the covers. I used to hide the covers of Harlequin Romances when I read them as a young teenager. Embarrassing! But if anything, I'm usually happy to share the title of whatever I'm reading at the moment with whoever might want to know. Probably a little too willing to share my thoughts, as well.

How about you? Do you carry books with you?

Back To School

The end of our summer was a little nuts. We sailed past Lady Liberty on our way out of New York Harbor on a cruise to Nova Scotia. It was a lovely trip, but...

...the last night of our cruise was a race with a hurricane into port. With the airports closed by the storm and Mayor Bloomberg, we were unable to return home to California on schedule. Stuck at my father-in-law's house, which is a lovely place to be, was still stuck.

Evacuated to a hotel because of the hurricane, but never in any danger, we returned to find a very large tree had fallen onto my father-in-law's garage roof.

We were on generator power for about a day while power was restored in the neighborhood, but other neighborhoods nearby lacked power for days, and others had flooded.

Four days later, we finally left for the west coast. By then the boys had missed almost the whole first week of school.

But now we're back in the swing of things, the rhythm of the school year reestablished.

I found I didn't read as much as I would have liked while cruising. But to be honest, I didn't really expect to finish all the books I downloaded onto the Kindle.

There was just too much to eat.

Now I'm back to reading. I've gotten about 100 pages into Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall, and I'm enjoying the voice. I love me a historical novel, and I'm liking the new angle on what I already know about Henry VIII and his cronies.

Just picked up Tom Perrotta's new one, The Leftovers, on the recommendation of a well-read cousin. It's about suburbia after the rapture, and what happens to those who are left behind. Sounds quirky and entertaining--I'll let you know.

Vacation Travel Reading: The East Coast

Well, I'm finally back to blogging after a summer off. It was unplanned, but it turned out that my kids were so busy this summer, I spent my time driving them around Los Angeles (even during "Carmageddon"!) instead of blogging.

My summer reading this summer has suffered from a general lack of time to laze at the beach or by the pool, but next week my family is taking it's first-ever cruise, and I'm loading up the suitcase with books! We are sailing out of Brooklyn, New York (who knew?) up to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then down the east coast, stopping in St. John, Bar Harbor, Portland, Boston, and Newport before heading back to New York. When I travel, I like to immerse myself in the literature of the place, so I have found some New England literature to read while sailing down its coast.

On my very first visit to Maine, I'm planning to read Sarah Orne Jewett’s classic novel, The Country of the Pointed Firs, first published in 1896, for a look at what life in coastal Maine was like at the turn of the twentieth century. People praise Jewett as one of the great American writers that nobody reads any more, and I'm eager to take in her characters and the atmosphere of the rocky coast of Maine.

One of my favorite books in recent years, Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout, is also set in Maine, but the Maine of the present, not the past. A set of interconnected stories that make up a novel, it's about ornery Maine woman Olive who looks back on her life and relationships in her small town, and it has an amazing sense of place.

There's so much good writing set in Boston that it's hard to choose one book. For non-fiction, I'd like to read David Hackett Fischer's book Paul Revere's Ride, which I've heard is an amazing piece of narrative history, and a compelling read.

I've also had a Boston novel, John P. Marquand's The Late George Apley, which won the author a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1938, on my to-read list for a long time. It is supposed to be another hidden gem by an author who fell out of favor in the 1960s, which satirizes the life and manners of the "Boston Brahmins" in pre-World War II Beacon Hill.

But when we round Cape Cod, I'm going to get out my old copy of Henry David Thoreau's book Cape Cod, an account of his meditative, beach-combing walking trips to Cape Cod in the 1850s, told with his trademark reverence for nature. The Cape is a wondrous place, and Thoreau's travelogue is satisfying a mixture of its folklore and natural history.

Another of my favorite books of all time is set on Cape Cod, Annie Dillard's The Maytrees. It is the chronicle of the ups and downs of a marriage over many years, set in the parabolic dunes of the very tip of the Cape, at Provincetown. I read it while sitting on a Cape beach one summer, and was captivated by Dillard's lyrical language and quirky characters.

We won't be visiting Providence, Rhode Island, this year, but it's a great city, and I was intrigued when I heard that its former mayor wrote a book about his exploits there. Politics and Pasta: How I Prosecuted Mobsters, Rebuilt a Dying City, Dined with Sinatra, Spent Five Years in a Federally Funded Gated Community, and Lived to Tell the Tale is a memoir by former Providence mayor Vincent “Buddy’’ Cianci, and I hear it's as colorful and controversial as the man himself.

When we hit the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, I plan to pick up Thornton Wilder’s fictionalized memoir, Theophilus North. It tells the tale of a young man who spends the summer of 1926 in Newport, teaching tennis to the rich, and getting caught up in their travails, narrated by the elderly North from a distance of 50 years.

I've heard good things about John Casey’s book Spartina, winner of the National Book Award in 1989. It's about Rhode Island fisherman and boat-builder Dick Pierce, his difficult family problems, and his life among the salt marshes and crab fishermen of South County, RI.

What vacation reading have you done this summer? Has any of it reflected the places you visited? What was your favorite summer read?

Sunday Salon--and the list grows...

I've been slowly making my way through Andre Dubus III's memoir Townie. It's admirably honest about his dysfunctional family and what it was like to grow up in poverty-stricken eastern mill towns in the 1970s. Dubus is a little older than I am, but the stuff about childhood in the 1970s struck a chord with me, and the details he provides about life in that time and place are fascinating to me. I loved the writing in House of Sand and Fog, so when I heard from my cousin that this memoir was really great, that and curiosity about Dubus's childhood made me pick this up. I'm happy to say that I'm again enjoying Dubus's style.

And I'm about to start a different kind of memoir for my book group, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, by Gabrielle Hamilton. This is another kind of memoir that I like--one that immerses you in a world you know very little about. It tells the story of owner and chef of New York's popular Prune restaurant, and her unusual path to becoming a chef. She tells of her childhood on a farm, her eccentric parents' divorce, and her struggles working in the food world. My book group once read (and enjoyed) Bill Buford's book Heat, about a journalist who immerses himself in the food and restaurant worlds. So I'm interested to read a memoir from a chef who came to it reluctantly.

What have you been reading this weekend?