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?

Booking Through Thursday--Age Inappropriate

Here are last week's and this week's Booking Through Thursday questions, because they go hand in hand, and I didn't answer last week:

Do you read books “meant” for other age groups? Adult books when you were a child; Young-Adult books now that you’re grown; Picture books just for kicks … You know … books not “meant” for you. Or do you pretty much stick to what’s written for people your age?

In contrast to last week’s question–What do you think of censoring books BECAUSE of their intended age? Say, books too “old” for your kids to read?

Last week's answer: When I was a kid, I reveled in reading things that were too "old" for me. I liked reading things that I thought were mature, that might teach me something I didn't already know about the adult world, that might unlock some adult secrets.

Now that I'm grown, I will sometimes read a young adult book, because I've heard it's fantastic, or because it reminds me of the very satisfying reading I did as a kid. I read picture books because I've got kids, and I've got no choice.

For this week's answer: I don't really censor books in my house. I figure that if you're going to learn something that's too "old" for you, the gentlest and most forgiving way to learn it is in the pages of a book. Not, say, in the graphic imagery of a movie or even a video game. And we don't have anything on our shelves that I think would be too shocking or would scar my kids for life. Except there might be an old copy of The Joy of Sex lurking somewhere around here, with those hilarious 1970s drawn illustrations. That might freak out the kids a little.

But I have a soft spot for the idea of a kid sneaking off to read Lolita or something she's heard is titillating. I think it's a rite of passage for readers.

What do you think?

Poetry: Spread the Word

My good friend Greg Pincus, whose poetry blog GottaBook was one of the first I ever followed, has a great new project where he is bringing poetry into schools. I've supported him, and I'm hoping others will do the same. Check it out:

Super Sad I Won't Be Able To Go To This...

I love our public library here in Los Angeles. The downtown branch is huge, historic, and really lovely. It's only a ten-minute drive from my house (sans traffic, of course), and the parking is easy. Plus they have ALOUD, a great lecture series that gets really good writers and other cultural figures to speak, and they're often interviewed by other really good writers and cultural figures. Plus the lectures are usually free.

On May 12, Gary Shteyngart is speaking, but the event was already full by the time I got the email. Somehow that always seems to happen to me--I'm not sure how these things fill up before I even hear about them. Clearly I'm getting some sort of second-class email notification.

It's too bad, because I just finished Shteyngart's book Super Sad True Love Story, and I'd love to hear him speak about it. If anyone goes, you'll have to let me know how it is.

Spring Break Is Almost Over

Blogging has gone by the wayside again around here. It's springtime, and I've been gardening, traveling and keeping my kids entertained through two back-to-back, two-week-long spring breaks instead. So happy school starts up again Monday!

Spring comes mighty early in the southland. Strawberries are almost ripe already.

I've managed to fit some reading in. For my book group, I finished The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obreht. I wanted to dislike this book merely because the writer is young, good-looking and accomplished. But I'm bigger than that, really. So I allowed myself to enjoy it quite a bit.

I've never read anything set in the Balkans before, and I found the setting rich and the novel an interesting mix of modern life and folklore. I was a little disappointed that the modern tale wasn't more filled out, but enjoyed the writer's weaving together of mythic elements and modern ones, and would happily read her next book.

Blackberries are getting there, too.

I'm almost finished reading Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, which I'm enjoying as a romp through a dystopian America in the near future. I'm entertained but not mesmerized; however, I'm a tough audience for dystopia, as it almost never grabs me emotionally.


And here are some future lemons. I have no idea when these guys will be ripe. But it's my first fruit from this young tree, so I can't wait!