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?

Sunday Salon--this week's reading

I've spent the week immersed in Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters. I love Tanizaki's style, and the wonderful detail about pre-war Osaka life, and how the traditional Japanese culture deteriorates as the country modernizes and prepares for war. I am fascinated by how Tanizaki crafts a plot out of countless small moments in this family's life. It is one of those books that sort of sneaks up on you, and all its layers come together to create a delicate and complete picture.

I also had time to zip through another book, a memoir called If You Knew Suzy: A Mother, a Daughter, a Reporter's Notebook, by Katherine Rosman, the sister of someone I know. It is the examination of a mother's life by her reporter daughter, after the mother has died of cancer. The daughter sets out to interview people who knew her mother, and in the process create a clearer picture of the mother, unclouded by their complicated relationship. It's an interesting idea for a memoir, and though the descriptions of the mother's illness and death were painful to read, it was thought-provoking on the subject of mother-daughter relationships, and how we as daughters see and don't see our mothers.

I've also started Laurie Colwin's book of essays, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen. I've loved Colwin's writing for twenty years--I've read all of her fiction, but this is the first time I'm reading her essays on food and cooking, which she wrote for Gourmet and other magazines. I love Colwin's easy, accessible, charming and very funny style. I'm looking forward to getting deeper into this one!

What have you been reading this week?

Sunday Salon--Book Group Reading

At our last meeting, my book group discussed Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids. I was planning to write a review, but after my group's discussion of the book, I must admit my thoughts grew muddled. I really enjoyed the book for several reasons. I liked Smith's voice, and I liked the way she was able to tell the story of her youth without judging herself in hindsight. I also liked the window she made for me into the New York art scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Smith lived at the Chelsea Hotel and frequented Max's Kansas City, and she got to know William Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Allen Ginsberg, among others. It was a colorful time, to say the least, and I enjoyed the anecdotes about the city and the scene at this time.

But I also came away with more questions than answers after reading this. It's clear that there was much that Smith didn't want to say. The book is a labor of love, a eulogy and love letter to her lover and best friend, Robert Mapplethorpe. At the beginning of the story, Smith is a naive girl who comes to the city to live a life about art. Some of my book group found her naivete surprising, if not suspect, but maybe it was this naivete, mixed with a certain kind of fearlessness, that allowed Smith to become an artist after all. Mapplethorpe seemed even more devoted than Smith to the idea of art for art's sake, and Smith makes it clear that they both truly believed in each other as artists, even when neither was entirely sure what direction their art might take. Again, Smith chronicles their development as artists, and people, without judging with the benefit of hindsight, and she has a lyrical, impressionistic storytelling style, so there isn't a lot of self-reflection here.

Maybe because as a society we are used to post-Freudian, post-Oprah gut-spilling self-reflection to the point of narcissism, this book seems unusual to me. It feels like, perhaps because she is being respectful of her dead friend's secrets, Smith doesn't tell the whole story about Mapplethorpe and her relationship with him. She does, however, treat him and her younger self with an admirable empathy. I go back and forth, both wanting to know more about how Smith felt (for example, upon learning her lover and trusted friend was homosexual, and having their relationship necessarily change because of it), and recognizing that maybe there are no words for much of what was going on, and because it was a different time (and only nascently feminist) place, and because Smith and Mapplethorpe were making up their own rules as they went along.

Smith has an appealing sense of humor and self-deprecation. One of the best anecdotes in the book is about how Allen Ginsberg once hit on Smith, thinking she was a particularly good-looking boy. I would recommend the book for anyone interested in the New York art scene of the late 60s and early 70s--plus the photos alone are worth the price of the book. My book group discussion about the book was pretty wide-ranging--we touched on misogyny in the art world, feminism, the spectrum of sexuality, poetry and rock and roll, the allure of Paris, obsessiveness about Baudelaire--so even though there was disagreement about the book, it sparked some interesting talk.

We agreed to read a novel next time, and we picked Chang-rae Lee's new book, The Surrendered. One of my good friends really loved Lee's A Gesture Life, so I got hold of a copy of that, too, and I hope to read both before our next meeting.

Lee is one of those novelists that has popped up out of nowhere for me. I'd love to hear what you all think of Lee, if you've read him...

Back home again

Settling back in after another weekend away. These are champagne problems, I know. My hubby and I had a wonderful weekend in San Francisco to celebrate our fifteenth wedding anniversary. Some foodie friends recommended more restaurants than we could have possibly visited, but we chose to dine at Quince and Delfina, both of which were wonderful.

We also took a long walk from the Marina to Fort Point, just under the Golden Gate Bridge. The photo at left is of the bridge from inside the fort. I didn't have my camera, just my phone, so this is the only picture really worth posting. The rest are fuzzy or lopsided or both.

The weather was gorgeous, and so was the city. And the kids had fun staying with my parents, so everyone was happy.

I'm still full from all of the eating.

I did a little reading, too. I downloaded a couple of the Fairacre series of books on my Kindle, which I started. I got through Miss Clare Remembers and Emily Davis (The Fairacre Series 4 & 8). The Fairacre series chronicles life in a rural English village from the late 1800s through the middle of the next century. Not a lot actually happens in most of the books, but they are full of atmosphere, and I'm enjoying them.

I also started The Middle Place, by Kelly Corrigan, which I'm reading for my book group. It's a memoir about her battle with cancer, and her father's battle with cancer at the same time. I'm enjoying Corrigan's voice, and somehow, despite the obviously difficult subject matter, it's not really a depressing book. It's not just about cancer; it's about being a daughter and a mother, and so far, I like it.

A Weekend in New York

I spent last weekend in New York, visiting a friend who recently moved there. It was freezing by Los Angeles standards, in the 40s and raining, but that didn't stop us from walking all over the West Village, Soho and Chelsea, exploring, shopping, and eating. It was a rare weekend away from the kids, in a city I love to visit.

I didn't have much time to read, except on the plane rides. But I did finish David Lebovitz's food memoir, The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World's Most Glorious - and Perplexing - City. I really enjoyed his conversational style, his funny anecdotes about living among Parisians, and especially his recipes. Lebovitz learned the pastry chef trade at Chez Panisse, and writes wonderful cookbooks and a blog that I love to check for recipes. I love how he writes about chocolate, because chocolate is something I can't live without.

So when my friend gave a dinner party for me in New York, I pulled out the book and made David Lebovitz's Mocha Creme Fraiche cake for dessert. It's a dense, chocolate-y, flourless wonder, and it was a big hit, and the recipe is definitely a keeper. I'll be pulling it out the next time I'm entertaining any chocolate lovers.

Now I'm back in good ol' 80-degree Los Angeles weather, kind of missing my New York gloves, boots, scarf and wool coat. Maybe I'll get to pull them out again when we all head up north to San Francisco next weekend...

Summer of My English Reading

My summer has been more chaotic than I am comfortable with, so in an unconscious response, I read several books about life in the English countryside, which calmed me down, as it always has in the past. I read two of Miss Read's books, Village Diary and Storm in the Village, which transported me to the middle of the last century and a rural village called Fairacre. I chuckled along with Miss Read, teacher in the village school, about the inhabitants' foibles. They are not plot-heavy books, but there is a rhythm to them that you get used to, and a structure that pays off in the end. I enjoyed their subtlety, and I'm sure I'll read more in the series.

I also read Beverley Nichols' Down the Garden Path, another chronicle of English country life, but through the lens of a city dweller who comes to the country to create the garden of his dreams. Nichols' dry wit and sharp eye for the ridiculous made me laugh out loud at times. Nichols' satire is impressively all-encompassing--he skewers his fellow villagers, his city visitors, and himself with equal vigor.

I'm moving away from rural England to Scandinavia now, to begin The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson, to bring a little northern chill into my hot Los Angeles August. Hope it works! I hear so many good things about this book, so I'm really looking forward to starting it.

Sunday Salon--Scattered

I've been really scattered in my reading lately. Sometimes it happens that I start a whole bunch of books at once, and then I'm pulled in too many directions in my reading. That's what's happening to me this weekend.

I started Christian Moerk's Darling Jim, which I'm reading for my book group. I'm reading it on my Kindle. It's a suspenseful novel, written with a lovely, lilting style, about obsession and storytelling, and some gruesome murders in a small Irish town, and of course I was just getting up a good head of steam when I realized the Kindle battery was low. So I had to interrupt my reading to rummage through my big box of electrical cords to find the Kindle charger. And then I couldn't find the charger, because I realized it was still packed in a bag I had taken on my last trip, and had already put away, up high, in the garage. So, that book got sidetracked by my short attention span, my bad organizational skills, and my inability to manage technology.

I am also reading Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, which won the Booker Prize last year. I love the narrator's voice, and I'm really enjoying the story. I also love the details about life in India. But I brought the paperback with me to a doctor's appointment a few days ago, and then I left it in the car. So I know I'll pick it back up again on Monday, when I start the week's round of carpooling and errand-running again, but today I'm trying to stay out of any four-wheeled vehicles. I'm just like that on Sundays.


I'm also reading Beverley Nichols' gardening memoir, Down the Garden Path. My sister-in-law and I first saw Nichols' books in a little bookstore when we were on vacation, and were intrigued--but neither of us could remember the author or titles later, when we wanted to buy them. But between us, we mustered up the brain cells to recall the title, and I immediately ordered the first book online. I like Nichols' 1930s-style wit, and being a haphazard gardener myself, I'm enjoying living vicariously through this book, as Nichols gets put through his gardening paces while putting his cottage garden in order. By the way, I love the covers of his books, they're so wonderfully old-fashioned.

I got distracted from the book on gardening by another passion of mine, food. I was trolling through my favorite food blogs, and I saw noted pastry chef David Lebovitz's book, The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World's Most Glorious - and Perplexing - City, mentioned. It's about his expatriate adventures living and cooking in Paris--with recipes!!--so of course I bought a copy of the book. So far I'm enjoying Lebovitz's sense of humor, too. There's a David Sedaris-style, self-deprecating, fish-out-of-water quality to the memoir so far, and I love books about life in Paris. Since I love dessert, and Lebovitz is a famed pastry chef who worked at Alice Waters's Chez Panisse, that's a plus.

Oh yes, and I'm obsessed with Masterpiece Theater's production of Little Dorrit. I'm watching it piecemeal, while I walk on the treadmill, but I've never looked forward to exercising more!

What are your Sunday reads this week?

Welcome to the Departure Lounge, by Meg Federico--a review

I often didn't know whether to laugh or cry while reading Welcome to the Departure Lounge: Adventures in Mothering Mother, by Meg Federico, so I ended up doing some of both. This is a wonderfully honest memoir of Federico's "adventures in mothering mother" (as the subtitle puts it) during her mother's final decline. It is by turns tragic and funny, and it should probably be on the required reading list for anyone dealing with the care of an aging parent.

Federico's 81-year-old mother Addie, a patrician New Jersey matron, lives a topsy-turvy life with her volatile new husband Walter. Walter has Alzheimer's, and Addie is frail and nearly blind, and despite various spills and alcohol-fueled thrills, Addie and Walter refuse to stay put in a nursing home. So Federico and Walter's daughter Cathy set up a precarious home-care situation for Addie and Walter, helped out by a hodge-podge of hired health-care workers, and overseen part-time by Federico, her brother, and Cathy. And it is this crazy situation at home that comes to be known as the Departure Lounge.

So much of what goes on in the Departure Lounge is absolutely appalling, but Federico is able to see the humor in every situation, and writes with poignancy and warmth about the good, the bad, and the ugly of elder care. She also writes with insight about how becoming her mother's caregiver transformed their very complicated parent-child relationship.

This relationship was fascinating to me because of its complications. Addie was a rich, mid-20th century wife and mother who raised children the way upper-middle class WASPs raised them then--with lots of criticism, judgement, and rules, without listening to them, and even tying them to the bed at night if they got up and inconvenienced you with night wanderings. The stories of how Federico's mother treated her were horrifying to me from today's perspective, but it was also interesting to see how Federico came to terms with her mother's rotten parenting style, and how she came to, if not forgive her, at least feel she more fully understood her mother and where she came from.

That the author could write about some of this heartbreaking stuff with such grace and wit was why I would recommend the book. It's a bittersweet memoir, one with important lessons for us all.

I won!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Thank you so much, Jessica, for this lovely book!

I won one of the Bluestocking Society's holiday extravaganza giveaway books: a copy of Monique and the Mango Rains, a memoir I've wanted to read since I saw several interesting reviews on the book blogs.

I'm looking forward to starting this one...

The Sunday Salon: Mother's Day

It's Mother's Day and I have managed to read a little. My husband and children's main gift to me is the time to go out to lunch alone with my own mother (a rare treat), with a little alone time thrown in, so I can read.

My precious moments have been spent reading Alice Munro's collection of stories The View from Castle Rock. I really enjoyed Munro's last book, Runaway, and I'm enjoying this, too. It's different from her earlier books because it's more personal. She's writing about her ancestors, from when they lived in 18th century Scotland, through their immigrating and settling in rural Canada, and then continuing with a possibly semi-autobiographical present. Though Munro has mostly created fiction about her ancestors, there is something in the solidity of dates and details that makes the reader know without being told that these are real people.

I like Munro's melding of fact and fiction. Her writing style suits the combination. I always love Munro's characters, because they often seem to be holding something back. I wonder how Munro does this. The characters are fully realized, they are beautifully drawn, and yet there remains a mystery about them that I find appealing. Maybe that's what makes them feel so real.

Is it just me, or does the paperback cover for this book not seem to suit its subject matter?

Here's the paperback cover:


And here's the hardback cover:

I don't know, I'm not usually very cynical, but that looks like one of the most obvious marketing ploys I've ever seen! To me, the hardback cover suits the book, as the title, "The View From Castle Rock", comes from an anecdote about a father bringing a son up to Castle Rock in Edinburgh to look out over the sea and see America--though what they are really seeing is Fife, the county across the Firth of Forth, five miles away at the most. I haven't finished the book, but so far have not come across any scenes of beach-going, sunbathing women, as seen on the paperback cover. Though perhaps they are in there--I haven't finished the book yet. Maybe someone out there can enlighten me!

I've also dipped into Lynne Sharon Schwartz's Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books, which I mooched off of BookMooch. It is a memoir about the joys and pitfalls of the reading life, and though I'm only 10 pages in, I'm enjoying it immensely. I love Schwartz's use of language. And as is usual in a book about reading, I see myself in her.

She talks about not finishing books, something I only recently have learned to do:

Over the last ten years or so, I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.

I'm really looking forward to the rest of this book!

If you'd like to participate in the Sunday Salon, check it out here.

Sunday Salon

When I first decided to participate in the Sunday Salon, I thought it would be easy to find time to both read and write about it on Sundays. I mistakenly thought I read quite a bit on the weekends. But I've since realized how wrong I was! Last Sunday, for example, I only read The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Go Away, Big Green Monster!...though I did read them both at least six times. This weekend we have houseguests, so it's even harder to get a few pages in.

But I did manage to sneak away and read some of Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories and the City, which I got from BookMooch. So far I'm really enjoying Pamuk's very personal style. In speaking about his family's apartments, he describes the gallery of family photos kept by his grandmother. Once enshrined there, a family member's photo was never moved. His musings on the family photographs resonated with me:

My prolonged study of these photographs led me to appreciate the importance of preserving certain moments for posterity, and in time I also came to see what a powerful influence these framed scenes exerted over us as we went about our daily lives...(I) was pulled in two directions, wanting to get on with life but also longing to capture the moment of perfection, savoring the ordinary but also honoring the ideal. But even as I pondered these dilemmas--if you pluck a special moment from life and frame it, are you defying death, decay and the passage of time or are you submitting to it?--I grew very bored with them.

I'm not very far into the book yet, but I appreciate Pamuk's blending of memoir with the history of his beloved city. His gift for description makes the city come alive--and makes me want to visit Istanbul someday!

I was also inspired by Pamuk's writing about his city to include a photo I took of my own city. In it I'm parked along Hollywood Blvd, and the Hollywood hills are behind me in the mirror, veiled in a typical Los Angeles haze.

Everything By Design, by Alan Lapidus--a review

I received and just read an advance copy of Alan Lapidus's new memoir, Everything by Design: My Life as an Architect. Lapidus is an architect for the rich and famous, a designer of hotels, casinos, and other large buildings for the likes of Donald Trump, Aristotle Onassis, John Tishman, and the Disney corporation.

Alan Lapidus is also the son of the architect Morris Lapidus, best known for his fantasy hotels the Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc in Miami. The elder Lapidus's style was loved by his consumers, but denigrated by critics as schlock. And though his son Alan worked with him for years, Morris Lapidus could only be described as difficult, as a father and as a business partner.

But even if Alan got almost no recognition from his father, he did learn valuable lessons about crowd-pleasing from him. Alan’s buildings are highly functional, and they have flair. And he is a great storyteller. You get the feeling that his friends listened to his stories about his life and work and said, “You’ve got to write a book about this.”

Lapidus doesn’t write about design per se, but he does write in a readable style about the logic he employs in designing his buildings, and how these buildings do or don’t get built. He also takes us behind the scenes in places like Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and Disney World, which are places that have their own logic and rules, are almost never seen by the public, and are fascinating to hear about. Also fun to read about are the personalities of the people, companies and institutions Lapidus has designed for, including Donald Trump, Bob Guccione, Michael Eisner and the rest of Disney, the CIA, and many others. He talks about the red tape he has had to cut through, the corporate cultures he’s had to navigate, and the cultural barriers he has had to straddle. It’s all very entertaining, both as a personal memoir and as a look at the foibles and excesses of the real estate world of the late twentieth century.