Showing posts with label *****. Show all posts
Showing posts with label *****. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Book Review: The Lake House by Kate Morton

Title: The Lake House
Author: Kate Morton
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: A pretty darn clean read

When Sadie Sparrow is placed on administrative leave from her police job (basically for becoming overly involved in the family of one of the cases she was investigating), she retreats to her newly-retired grandfather's home in Western England. Even though she's supposed to be relaxing and regrouping, her mind cannot rest, and soon she finds herself investigating the decades-old disappearance of a baby boy from an estate in town. She reaches out to Alice Edevane, the sister of the lost boy, who was sixteen when her brother disappears and is now a reclusive, cranky writer in her eighties. Alice and her sister have never talked about their brother's disappearance, and both always carried the weight of their own culpability. In The Lake House, Morton manages to marry the strains of guilt, responsibility and familial love of all kinds.

The Lake House is a remarkable book. There are many books that I get to the end of and think, "I could have written that." The Lake House has such a complicated story, and Morton manages to bring back tiny threads from early in the story that become prominent as everything comes to light. I was delighted to guess the mystery right with about 100 pages left to go, and even though some people might say that the way Morton ties together some of the threads are implausible, I prefer to see them as lovely and serendipitous.

Monday, February 15, 2016

Book Review: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

Title: When Breath Becomes Air
Author: Paul Kalanithi
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Hard Copy
Content Alert: a pretty clean read. There are a handful of swear words, but don't let that hold you back from reading this beautiful book.

When Paul Kalanthi was thirty-six, just a year from completing his training as a neurosurgeon, and just on the verge of finally achieving adulthood, he was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer. In When Breath Becomes Air, Kalanthi looks back on his life, especially on his training in medicine and literature, and how those two fields informed his approach to his disease, and, ultimately to his death.

A few years ago, I read a short piece by Kalanthi published in The New York Times. If you've read this blog for a long time, you probably know that I love literature about medicine, and this piece, and this story, really hit home for me, because, like Ed and I a few years earlier, Kalanthi was poised at the beginning of a life he'd spent half a lifetime preparing for. It felt so unfair, and I really admired the poetry of his language and the pathos I felt while reading. When Breath Becomes Air manages to retain the beauty in the language of that shorter piece, while providing a more extended meditation of life. This is a fabulous book for any reader, whether confronting your mortality or not.

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Book Review: Humans of New York Stories by Brandon Stanton

Title: Humans of New York: Stories
Author: Brandon Stanton
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Hard Copy
Content Alert: a pretty clean read, but the stories really run the spectrum

Remember back in the day before smartphones when people used to keep a stack of magazines in the bathroom for a little toilet reading? In my house we even had a book called The Bathroom Book, with bite-sized little tidbits, short enough for a potty break. It's kind of ironic that Brandon Stanton's The Humans of New York phenomenon started on Instagram (which has definitively won the bathroom reading battle, if there was one), because Humans of New York: Stories, would be the best back of the toilet book ever.

Stanton's book is his Instagram account in published form. My sense is that Stanton walks around New York and asks people if he can take their picture, then asks them a few questions, and picks a snippet from that short interview to post along with the picture. With 4.7 million followers, the account is insanely popular (and whoa, all the judgy jerks on the internet who used to hang out on message boards now comment on HONY), and I'm always impressed with the way Stanton manages to get something interesting and profound of the people he talks with. There seems to be a light attempt at some thematic arrangements in the book, but mostly, the pictures and stories speak for themselves. Even though I'd read most of the stories individually when they came out on Instagram, there was a power to reading them together in the book.


Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Book Review: Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

Title: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: maybe some language?

Have you ever wanted to live creatively but felt mired in the everyday miasma of living? I do. In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert writes about steps to take to live a creative life. She talks a lot about the spirituality of creative inspiration, which I really love about the book. And yes, it's a motivational rah rah sort of book, and that's just what I need right now. You see, I don't just read books and review books. I've always wanted to write books. Right now, I'm about 50 pages into the first draft of a novel. It's an idea that I've had percolating for a while (if you have an hour I'd be happy to tell you all about it), and I gave myself a deadline-- by the end of this school year, I want to have a complete draft. But finding time to write with six kids and a job and editing Segullah and being primary president isn't easy. So I need the motivational speeches.

I wrote a post about this book the other day at Segullah, and how it both inspires and scares me. This book could change your life, but probably not if you listen to the audiobook. I felt similar to how I felt when I listened to Brene Brown's Rising Strong-- that when you listen to an audiobook, it's hard to stop and think and take notes (I usually listen when I'm running or folding laundry or driving), so a lot of the stuff I want to remember gets missed. And it's probably better to mete out the motivation bit by bit. When I was a senior in high school, I spent the whole year collecting quotes, which I printed out on my word processor and then cut into tiny hearts and pinned to the bulletin board in my freshman dorm room. I feel like I could pin a whole board of quotes from this book that would be useful to me as a writer, but now I've forgotten all of them. Never fear, though, Gilbert has a podcast that serves as a companion to the book, and I'm waiting to listen to the first episode when I need an extra dash of motivation.

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Book Review: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Title: A Little Life
Author: Hanya Yanagihara
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: repeated sexual abuse of a child, violence

A couple of nights ago, Ed and I were driving down to the BYU basketball game together, and I started telling him about this fantastic book I was reading. I said something about how it was about a group of friends who met in college, then moved to New York, and how the central character, Jude St. Francis, had suffered horrible abuse as a child, first abandoned at birth, then growing up in a monastery, then when he was taken by one of the monks and used as a prostitute, then finally, when he ran away and met even worse people who damaged him both physically and mentally. But eventually he became successful and found a family and someone with whom he could share his life, and yes, it's true that he refused to talk to anyone about his past and cut himself to deal with the psychic pain, but it really was a fantastic story.

"Wow," Ed said. Remind me not to read that book.

A Little Life is a deep dive into Jude St. Francis's life. His struggles to overcome his past, and the way he never really can see himself as something other than fragile or broken. I don't think it could be classified as anything other than a tragedy, but it's also hopeful in lots of ways. I think it shows that someone whose life is scarred from the beginning and continues to bear those wounds can also have moments, even years, of beauty. It's a difficult book, and a book that is both incredibly detailed yet also feels almost timeless (I never could figure out what year the book started and what year it ended-- it all felt like it took place in the present), and I can see that it wouldn't be something everyone would enjoy, but I found it really moving, and I think I'm a more empathetic person for having known Jude, at least over the course of 700 pages.

Friday, September 25, 2015

Book Review: The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

Title: The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Author: Richard Flanagan
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: War, sex, language-- it's definitely a book for adults

Dorrigo Evans is a fine doctor, although what would have been his crowing achievement as a surgeon, a new cancer surgery, didn't work out. Although he's been married for many years, he's a complete failure as a husband, and a minor failure as a father, a role that seems almost forgotten as he nears the end of his life. He's been a serial adulterer forever. He once knew true love. And a long, long time ago, he led a group of POWs in Burma during World War II. For that, the people of Australia consider him one of their greatest heroes.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a complicated book. The narration, which goes back from the 1910s and forward to the 1990s with many stops in between, isn't always easy to follow. Dorrigo's motivations are often unclear as well. Why does he act so nobly on behalf of his men, dying by the dozens as they work to build a train line, but so ignobly at home? Does the loss of one love kill all other opportunities for love? What purpose does sex serve when it doesn't bring two people together? The Narrow Road to the Deep North is beautifully written and very thought-provoking. There's a scene toward the end of the novel when he sees a woman he hasn't seen in years which is possibly the loveliest and most painful thing I've read in my life. It's not an easy read, but it as a rewarding one.

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Book Review: The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander

Title: The Light of the World
Author: Elizabeth Alexander
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: This book digs deeply into grief and loss

Poet and Yale professor Elizabeth Alexander expected April 4, 2012 to be a regular evening, juggling work and child care of her two boys, Solomon and Simon, with her husband, Ficre. Then, the bottom dropped out of their lives when Ficre, so healthy and full of life, suddenly died of a heart attack while exercising on the treadmill. The Light of the World is an elegy in prose, in which Alexander shows how Ficre, an Ethiopian painter and chef, brought color and spice to her life, and how she and her boys mourned and lived in the time just after his death.

I listened to The Light of the World in less than a day, and I would have listened to Alexander talk about Ficre and her love for him for ten times as long if she had written more. This isn't a whitewashed love story-- she's open and honest and raw about the imperfections of their life together, but that doesn't diminish the story-- it endeared me to them. I loved the inside view Alexander gave us into her life-- it takes a brave author to be willing to expose the private aspects of life, especially and love and grief and raising teenagers, and Alexander shows herself both wise and brave in The Light of the World.

Monday, September 14, 2015

Book Review: Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll

Title: Luckiest Girl Alive
Author: Jessica Knoll
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: This one is pretty dark-- violent, non-consensual sex, consensual sex, swearing

Ani seems to have the perfect life-- she's an editor at a magazine in Manhattan, she lives with her stockbroker fiance, she has a perfect body and perfect clothes and is planning the perfect wedding. But the veneer of perfection is thin, and underneath that perfect exterior is Tiffani FaNelli, the girl she once was-- the chubby insecure girl whose mom talked too loud and whose parents never had enough money for her to really fit in at her private school in Philly. Although Ani would say she has risen above her past (and we learn more about the dark secrets of that past as Luckiest Girl Alive unfolds), but she is not happy. In fact, the book opens with visions of Ani stabbing that perfect fiance with knives from their wedding registry.

I know that Luckiest Girl Alive is getting mixed reviews. Ani is an unreliable narrator, and she's pretty unlikeable too. While Knoll worked as a writer for the same kinds of magazines that Ani writes for, I don't think she made Ani unlikeable by coincidence. She name drops. She's obsessed with brands and with keeping herself thin. She's marrying a guy who seems more like an accessory than a partner. All in all, she's kind of a nightmare. She was a nightmare fifteen years ago, when she started at the Bradley School too. But Knoll does a great job making readers interested enough care about his damaged girl, and then lays out a harrowing, totally compelling story of what happened to Ani during that pivotal freshman year. I can't tell too much without giving things away, but this book is full of twists and turns, and deals with issues far more important (like sexual abuse, school violence, and class issues) than having the perfect boots for the season.

Friday, September 11, 2015

Book Review: The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall

Title: The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy
Author: Jeanne Birdsall
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: A clean read

When I was a little girl, I loved novels in series. Little House gave way to Betsy-Tacy and All of a Kind Family, and then I started reading Anne of Green Gables and read all eight books at least once a year until I left for college. I wanted my daughters to have this same kind of series experience, but sometimes I worry that the world has changed so much in the last thirty years that Betsy-Tacy doesn't have the same allure for my daughters that it did for me, and so far, they haven't shown much interest in any of the books series that I adored as a girl (which is fine, I guess, there are a lots of good books out there, right?). Then I came upon The Penderwicks, which my lovely friend Catherine mentioned in her list of top summer reads for kids in a segment on Channel 5. Maren and I started reading this together, but then she wanted to read something else, so I finished on my own. The Penderwicks is the first book in a series of five about four sisters who take a summer vacation with their widowed father to a cottage on an estate in the Berkshires. They have lots of adventures with Jeffrey, who lives in the big house with his imposing mother.

The Penderwicks is the kind of book that could take place in 1950 or 2015. While Birdsall mentions a computer once, the book feels totally timeless. The girls have the kind of unplugged, roaming adventures that parents think don't really happen any more. I loved the characters of each of the four girls, who are nicely differentiated by the author, and with whom most readers will find someone to identify. I'm definitely hooked-- I want to see where The Penderwicks go from here, and I want to take my kids to a cottage in the mountains without wifi and see what happens.

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Book Review: We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

Title: We Were Liars
Author: E. Lockhart
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Personal copy
Content Alert: Some swearing, dark theme for young teens

Take three cousins, and one friend so close he's practically family: Cady, Mirren, Johnny and Gat. Add one private island off of Martha's Vineyard and lots of inherited wealth. Mix in jealously, lust, and power struggles, and the result can be tragic.

We Were Liars is a book that's hard to write about in a review. I'm usually one for spoilers. I often like a book better if I know exactly what it's about. But in the case of this book, I think even telling people that there are spoilers might ruin the experience for them. I'm a little surprised that I got my hands on this book and started reading without knowing what it was all about (it got a lot of buzz last summer when it was first published). So I won't ruin it and tell you. What I will tell you is that if you appreciate a great story, a story that requires a reader to be engaged work out what's happening along with the narrator, who may or may not be reliable, then this is a book with a rewarding payoff. Lockhart writes in a spare, poetic style, and makes good use of fairy tales to shed light on the story of what exactly went wrong with the Sinclair family in summer fifteen.

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Book Review: Finders Keepers by Stephen King

Title: Finders Keepers (Bill Hodges Trilogy #2)
Author: Stephen King
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: Violence, swearing

In 1978 Morris Bellamy and his friends break into the home of John Rothstein, an author who seems to be part JD Salinger, part John Updike, part Harper Lee. While Bellamy's friends think they're just going to rob the guy and get out of there, Bellamy is after something more-- he wants to know what Rothstein, the author of three books about Jimmy Gold, has been writing since he stopped publishing in 1961. The men kill Rothstein in the heist and hit paydirt, finding more than $25,000 and a whole safe full of notebooks. But before Bellamy can read the stories, he's arrested on an unrelated charge and spends the next 38 years in prison.

Thirty-five years later, at the height of the financial crisis, Pete Saubers finds a trunk full of money and notebooks buried in the woods. It seems an answer to prayer, since Pete's father was injured at the civic center massacre a year earlier, and Pete anonymously sends the money to his family, bits at a time. But he becomes even more interested in those notebooks, and when Bellamy gets out of jail, he's willing to do just about anything to get them back. We get the same familiar cast of characters we grew to love in Mr. Mercedes-- Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney and Jerome Robinson, who try to save Pete's gravy before it's too late.

You may be reading this review in July, but I'm writing it in June, the last of more than a dozen books I reviewed over a couple of days. They were the first of my summer reads, and I saved Finders Keepers until the end because I loved it so much that I knew I'd keep writing them if I had this carrot dangling at the end of my line. I really enjoyed Mr. Mercedes, the first book in the Bill Hodges trilogy, but Finders Keepers is far better (which is practically unheard of with trilogies, right?). It's also the kind of book where you don't have to read the first one to know what the second one is all about. Yes, there are too many details (you get the sense that Stephen King is a bit disdainful of people who are overweight, for example), and it could be a little shorter, but the story itself is super exciting. And it's a book for readers. Both Bellamy and Saubers genuinely love the Jimmy Gold story so much that they share more than they'd like to admit. King writes beautifully about how a love of literature can shape a life, for good or for evil.

Saturday, July 4, 2015

Book Review: Everything You Ever Wanted by Jillian Lauren

Title: Everything You Ever Wanted: A Memoir
Author: Jillian Lauren
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: Some swearing

When Jillian Lauren gets to the point in her life where she wants a child, she has lived a very full life-- she's been an actress, a member of a harem, a drug addict, a cosmetologist, a rock star's wife, and an MFA student, just to name a few things. One thing that it seems like she might never be is a mother, and after several years of infertility, she and her husband Scott Shriner (bassist for Weezer) adopt a son, Tariku, from Ethiopia. And then, they set out on the task of learning to become a family.

I can't tell you how many times Everything You Ever Wanted made me cry. I was crying even before Tariku entered the picture, just from the way Lauren was able to get her life back together (she talks about her best friend, who also struggled with addiction, throughout the memoir, and it provides a haunting counterpoint). I adore her for the honesty about which she talks about raising Tariku. Raising kids who know trauma and loss, who have been abandoned and neglected, is no small stuff. Many of us put smiles on our faces, but Lauren goes the places that so many of us feel-- sometimes at our wit's end, but loving these kids with a desperate ferocity. So thanks, Jillian Lauren, for this book. For your gift with words, and for making me feel not quite so alone. And for the beautiful way in which you're raising your son. It gives me hope.

Monday, June 29, 2015

Book Review: The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson

Title: The Sky is Everywhere
Author: Jandy Nelson
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Personal Copy
Content Alert: Swearing, acknowledgement of teen sex

Seventeen-year-old Lennie has always been okay with being second. She's the second clarinet in band at her Northern California high school, the one her best friend is always encouraging to live a little, and the younger, quieter of two sisters being raised by their uncle and grandmother. When her older sister Bailey suddenly dies, Lennie doesn't know how to grieve, doesn't know how to be alone, and feels uncomfortable with all of the attention she's getting. To make matters worse, she's feeling attracted to two boys, Bailey's boyfriend Toby, maybe the only person on earth who understands how Lennie feels, and Joe, the gorgeous French horn player who just moved to town and doesn't understand that Lennie is supposed to be a sidekick. The Sky is Everywhere is a hard, lovely story about a girl who's trying to put her own mind back together after it's been rocked in the worst way possible.

I think most people who read my blog know how much I loved Nelson's 2014 second book, I'll Give You the Sun, when I read it last year (The Sky is Everywhere is her first book). Annie is reading it now, and it's all I can do not to go into her room every day and grill her about what she thinks about it. So the bar was set high, really, really high, for The Sky is Everywhere. Did it succeed? In many ways, I think it did. Nelson does a great job making Lennie a rounded character, someone I felt like I knew and understood. She does incredibly stupid things during the course of the novel and matures a lot in the process. The supporting cast of characters is also pretty great, and the way Nelson intersperses dozens of poems and notes that Lennie writes to Bailey in the months after her death (and finally ties them into the narrative) is also lovely. It wasn't quite as moving for me as I'll Give You the Sun, but I think that was mainly because I loved the way she focused on the brother-sister relationship in that novel, and redeeming people who thought themselves too broken for redemption, while The Sky is Everywhere is more of a totally rocking, very thoughtful, teen romance.

Friday, June 26, 2015

Book Review: In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume

Title: In the Unlikely Event
Author: Judy Blume
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: Some sex, some swearing

Within a three-month period in 1951-1952, there were three major commercial plane crashes in Elizabeth, New Jersey (near Newark airport). Author Judy Blume was an eighth-grader in Elizabeth at the time, and in her most recent novel, Blume fictionalizes that experience. Although In the Unlikely Event is told from the point of view of more than a dozen characters, the one at the center of the story is Miri Ammerman, a ninth-grader who experiences first love and lots of changes within her family and friend group in the months that the planes are falling from the skies.

When I was twelve, Judy Blume was my favorite author. She taught me all about periods, mastrubation, sex, scoliosis, party lines and divorce, and I read her books over and over again. I loved her so much back then, probably because she seemed to trust young girls with hard topics. All of those happy feelings came rushing back in In the Unlikely Event. Miri Ammerman could be Margaret or Deenie, and Blume is still a master of all of the insecurities that young girls feel. There are lots of voices in this story, and lots of threads to keep track of, but I found that after a hundred pages or so, it wasn't hard to keep things straight. What was hard was turning off my audiobook long enough to engage with my family.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Book Review: The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown

Title: The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
Author: Daniel James Brown
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: Maybe some swearing, but I don't remember much

While The Boys in the Boat is the story of a bunch of young men from the University of Washington and their coach, and the obstacles they overcame to win a gold medal in crew in the 1936 Olympics, it's really the story of Joe Rantz, a boy whose mother died when he was a baby, who was abandoned by his father and stepmother and left to raise himself while he was still a child, who managed to survive, on his own at the heights of the Great Depression, and who found himself rowing crew for the University of Washington, not, as many of his teammates did, to have a fun extracurricular activity, but so he could afford to attend school and get an education. By the end of the story, while I was rooting for all eight boys in the boat, it was Rantz who had captured my heart.

Captured my heart. That's an interesting phrase to use when writing about a nonfiction book. This week we were at my in-laws' house for Father's Day, and the women in the family were talking about books. My sister-in-law agreed that although David McCullough's John Adams was an important book, it was also a fairly boring book. While I would never fault McCullough's writing or scholarship, I find myself gravitating more to nonfiction books that I might classify as "storytelling history." I was first introduced to these kind of books with Erik Larson, Bill Bryson, and Laura Hillenbrand-- you know, these are the books you want to read for the story, and they keep you reading even though they're nonfiction. Daniel James Brown belongs to this class of writers (and I think it's great company). I realize that I am probably the last person in America to read The Boys in the Boat, but if I'm wrong, it's worth a read for sure. I listened to it while I was running the Ogden Marathon, and it was definitely engrossing enough to keep me reading, even when the running was not fun.

Monday, March 2, 2015

Book Review: Death Coming Up the Hill by Chris Crowe

Title: Death Coming Up the Hill
Author: Chris Crowe
Enjoyment Rating: ****
Source: Library Copy
Content Alert: Difficult subjects (war and family dysfunction) but a clean read

The year is 1968 and the war in Vietnam provides a backdrop for the domestic struggle going on in Ashe's home. His mom is a peacenik who buys him "Hell no, we won't go" t-shirts, and his dad is a hawk who takes every word that drops from Walter Cronkite's mouth as gospel truth until the moment Cronkite suggests that America might want to retreat from the war. As the year progresses and Ashe's own views on the war start to solidify, events that are outside of his control threaten his future. This is a story about family, fear, love, growing up, and facing responsibility.

That's a book you might want to read just based on the synopsis, right? Now, what if I told you the entire book is written as a series of haiku. There are 16,592 syllables in Death Coming Up the Hill, one for each American killed in Vietnam in 1968. That might scare some readers, and if I'd known that was how the book was written before I got home with it, it might have scared me off. But these are not your average haiku. The book reads like a novel, and also like a beautiful poem. At one point, Crowe says that it's what's in the gaps that are important in Death Coming Up the Hill, and he does a great job telling the story while leaving gaps for us to fill in. I love literary fiction that experiments with form when it doesn't detract with from the narrative, and this form works to enhance the narrative. The book is a remarkable achievement, one that captures what it feels to be seventeen in 1968 (as my mother was), what it feels like to face a war, and what it feels like to be in a family that's falling apart. All in all, this is a beautiful, startling, sad, and immensely readable book.

Thursday, February 26, 2015

Book Review: To The Mountain: One Mormon Woman's Search for Spirit by Phyllis Barber

Title: To the Mountain: One Mormon Woman's Search for Spirit
Author: Phyllis Barber
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Digital Copy

After Phyllis Barber and her husband raised their sons as traditional Mormon parents living in Salt Lake City, the pair divorced, and Barber divorced herself from the LDS Church too. To the Mountain is a series of beautiful essays, delving into the child-rearing years, the years away from the church, and the experiences that led her back to the Mormon faith.

This collection of essays is all the good things-- honest, literary, real. It may be uncomfortable for some rank-and-file Mormons in some places, but I loved seeing the variety of experiences that enriched Barber's spirit, and appreciated that those things could be seen in a holistic way that enlightened her life as a Mormon, too. I see this book not just as a collection of essays, but as a journeying piece, in which Barber seems to come to a sense of peace.

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Book Review: Hemingway on a Bike by Eric Freeze

Title: Hemingway on a Bike
Author: Eric Freeze
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Digital Copy

We all know that Ernest Hemingway aspired to be the most masculine man of the twentieth century. When I think of Hemingway, I think of those Dos Equis commercials about the most interesting man in the world. Hemingway threw himself headlong into bullfighting, deep sea fishing, large game hunting, drinking, womanizing, and generally being larger than life. Think of him as  an AJ Jacobs who oozes machismo. Essayist Eric Freeze seems takes inspiration from a vision he has of Ernest Hemingway riding a road bike through Paris, but his essays meander through themes of spirituality, masculinity, francophilia, parenting, home repair, and popular culture.

This is a fantastic collection of essays-- one that seems to work as a cohesive whole (I read the book in one sitting) since it feels vaguely chronological (even if it's not), but I would imagine that a more leisurely reading would be even more fruitful. The collection as a whole is sweet, quick-paced, and a little daring. I think Hemingway would approve.

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Book Review: The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

Title: The Snow Child
Author: Eowyn Ivey
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Audible
Content Alert: A pretty clean read, sex is implied in places but not descriptive

Jack and Mabel are at their wits' ends, both literally and figuratively. It's 1920, and after years of barrenness and not fitting in in Pennsylvania, they decide to homestead in Alaska, only to discover that Alaska is unforgiving, a place where even young people and families find it hard to get started. Mabel considers suicide, Jack considers working in the mines. Then one night, they forget their troubles and come together to build a child in the snow. The next morning, Faina appears in the wilderness with a red fox at her side. As the weeks pass, they see Faina more frequently, and begin to gain her trust, but when the last snow melts she returns to the woods. As the years pass, Faina becomes the reason for Jack and Mabel to live, and to stay. They see her as a daughter, but they're not entirely where she comes from, or why she chose them to love.

There are few books I've read that are more haunting or more beautiful than The Snow Child. Ivey, who lives in Alaska, does a wonderful job capturing the desolation of the place. I also identified so strongly with Mabel, the daughter of a professor, who feels wholly out of bounds in Alaska, and who finds a fairy tale about a snow child in a box of books her sister sends, and isn't sure whether Faina is a feral human or a fairy. The book is complicated and nebulous and wonderful. It's also the sweet story of a family bound together by love and mutual need. It's definitely worth reading, and the audio book is fabulous.

Book Review: Fire in the Pasture, edited by Tyler Chadwick

Title: Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets
Author: Tyler Chadwick
Enjoyment Rating: *****
Source: Paper Copy

I'm teaching Literature of the LDS at BYU Salt Lake this semester. When I agreed to teach, I felt pretty confident in my ability to talk about essays, short stories, novels, film, and even drama, but I knew that I'd need some help with poetry. I asked friends for recommendations on what text I should use, and the universal response was Tyler Chadwick's Fire in the Pasture, which is an anthology containing several hundred poems by modern Mormon poets. Several hundred poems still felt daunting, and since the world of Mormon Lit is pretty small, I took a chance and emailed Chadwick, explaining my situation, and within a day, he emailed back with a list of the poems he'd recommend I use with my students. We had a great discussions about baby blessings, baptisms, missionary experiences, teaching Primary, laundry, canning fruit, wedding night jitters, and boob jobs. This collection is full of great poems that my students found relatable and funny and meaningful, and I can't wait to spend more time with it.