When a Reader of Fiction Steps Over the Line

As a reader, I'm instinctively drawn to fiction. I like a good story; I want to be pulled into a tale without any sense of how it may or may not connect directly my real life. Fiction expands and examines life by centering experience within the realm of ideas, and that is why I can sometimes be forgiving of novels that have a few structural flaws or a slight weakness in characterization. If the ideas brought up in a novel or short story are fascinating; if they resonate; if they leave me thinking beyond the scope of the pages of the book, then I'll be compelled to stay with them.*

I'm much more selective when it comes to nonfiction. Not because I am limited by my habit of looking first at the fiction shelves, but because I want much the same thing from nonfiction as I do from fiction. I want a good story. I want to be pulled in. I want what I learn from nonfiction to be centered within the realm of ideas. As I've said elsewhere, I believe facts can be beautifully written. With limited time to get through my "To Be Read" pile, however, nonfiction has to grab my attention and keep it right from the start. It's likely to do so if the writing is compelling.

It's interesting to me that the two most frequently accessed posts on this blog are The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barberry--a novel of Big Ideas--and The Psychopath Test  by Jon Ronson--a nonfiction journey into "the madness industry." Both are fascinating; both tell a compelling story; both have characters with motivations we are intrigued by.

Fiction? Nonfiction? When a story is good, it's good. Can't ask much more than that.







*This is not to say I don't read for pure entertainment. I do enjoy novels that float along without Themes hanging from the story like ballast--pure story is lovely and a much-welcomed change of pace from Big Old Tomes--but English major habits of digging deep (perhaps deeper than is good for me)  die hard.

Seven Titles for Your Summer Reading List

One hazard of writing an independent book blog is that writing reviews can sometimes become a like job rather than a hobby. I love writing reviews of books I enjoy, but sometimes I find myself reading with a sense of obligation ("Oh, I really must write a review of this!") rather than falling heedlessly into the story as is natural to me. If I were doing paid critical reviews--reading whatever is handed to me for the purpose of reviewing a book whether or not I truly enjoy it--that would be one thing, but I started this blog to gush over books I love.

The tough part is when I truly enjoy a novel, one that is worth writing about, but one I just want to experience as a reader and nothing more. There's a different sort of compliment in reading something simply for the sake of reading it. 

So, there are seven books for your Summer Reading List that I've read recently and highly recommend. Once you read them, I hope you'll see right away why they're on the list.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje

The World Without You by Joshua Henkin

The Rain Before it Falls by Jonathan Coe

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

A Visit from the Goon Squad  by Jennifer Egan

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Hester Among the Ruins by Binnie Kirshenbaum

The epigraph for Hester Among the Ruins is from James Baldwin: "People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them." This is particularly true for Hester Rosenfeld, an American historian who has made her mark writing popular biographies of everyday Americans born during the colonial era. As she explains it, "history is not with the powers that be, but with the common man."

But Hester has grown weary of writing about American colonists. She's restless; she needs a change of pace. While casting about for a new subject, thinking maybe she'll focus on an aspect of medieval Europen history, Hester is put in touch with a renowned German historian named Heinrich Falk. Within a day or two of meeting Falk at a conference in Munich, Hester has decided a few things: she will pick up and move to Munich; Falk, himself, will become her subject; and she will become his mistress.

Hester tries to convince us that HF is a legitimate subject of her work rather than the work being an excuse to peer, with his full consent, into all the corner of his past, and integrate herself fully into his present: "he was a war baby raised in the quagmire of defeat by a generation of murderers at worst or cowards as best. A German after the fact, he is the prototype of the everyman of a nation occupied, divided, and then put together again....These years of his could well make for a provocative document...."

Hester believes that she and HF are clearly destined for each other, but aside from the obvious complications of negotiating an affair with a married man in a foreign city, there is a dilemma faced by these two characters. They consider themselves enlightened enough and, strangely, ahistorical enough to bypass the complications that modern history has inescapably placed between them. Hester is a secular American Jew whose parents immigrated to the U.S. just before the war, and HF is a German born at the tail end of a war caused in large part by his culture's ingrained antisemitism and cultural hubris. His mores were formed by that Germany, though he believes that he is free of the prejudices of his country's past. Hester's point of view is that her Jewishness is a facet of her identity that doesn't have a lot to do with her everyday life.

Heavy themes aside, this novel is laced through with wicked humor. Hester is one of the most funny and ballsy characters I've come across in a long time. The interchanges between Hester and HF are often hilarious--he's uncommonly vain and, ever the professional, she takes notes during even the most romantic of evenings, titling one section of her notebook "Nutball Things He Says." Throughout the novel Kirshenbaum inserts italicized selections from Hester's notebook that offer a different perspective on HF and, often, on her own motivations.

I love this novel for its blend of depth and lightness; its serious, yet funny look at how we live within our own and our culture's history; the big questions it seeks to answer. I left the novel wondering how Kirshenbaum was able to blend all these elements together in such an entertaining way and thankful that she did so with such heart and artistry.

Guest Blogger Lila Donnovan Recommends Three for the 8-12 set

Kiki Strike and the Shadow City by Kirsten Miller

Ananka Fishbein is a not-so-average 12-year-old New Yorker. Her tremendous knowledge, derived from spending countless hours reading in her parents’ enormous library, contrasts with her C-average grades. Greatly unappreciated by her parents and teachers, Ananka’s  life is incredibly flavorless until she explores a sinkhole near her apartment house. There she discovers something that she can’t even grasp the importance of until she meets Kiki Strike, a mysterious girl who seems to appear and disappear at will. With the help of Kiki and some misfit girl scouts, Ananka  stumbles upon a secret even bigger than she ever imagined. For ages 10+, even adults will enjoy this series full of fun, action, danger, and unforgettable characters.

A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket

Cleverly disguised as a children’s series, A Series of Unfortunate Events is an amazing series about the Baudelaire orphans, three siblings who lost their home and their parents in a terrible fire. Each of the 13 books contains the story of one unfortunate event, most of them involving the the Baudelaires trying to escape the clutches of  an evil villain called Count Olaf. From The Bad Beginning to The End, Lemony Snicket begs you not to read the series by incorporating long lectures, in hopes of putting you to sleep, and by contrasting his books to more enjoyable books that would be more worth the time than A Series of Unfortunate Events is. I highly recommend devoting yourself to all 13 books, which are about 300 pages each. Any age from eight and up can enjoy these books, riddled with humor and despair.

Gilda Joyce, Psychic Investigator (a series) by Jennifer Allison

Gilda Joyce, Psychic Investigator is the first in a series of five, but I read them out of order and understood the plots just fine.  Gilda is a spunky, creative girl whose story begins the summer after eighth grade and continues a few years into high school. After Gilda’s father dies, two years before the story starts, Gilda gets interested in contacting the spirit world. Guided by her favorite book, The Master Psychic’s Handbook, she goes on many adventures. From the haunting of her distant relative’s house in San Francisco (Book 1) to the mysterious circumstances surrounding her mother’s vacation to Florida (Book 5),  this Detroit girl is lovable, funny, and relatable. Gilda’s unique personality is defined by her blunt comments, vintage clothing, and occasional journal entries in the form of updates and letters to her dad, all typed on his old typewriter. One of my favorite ‘re-read series,’ I recommend this book to ages nine and above, though parents should be cautioned that there are some scary events, romance, and a single use of the B-word in the first book, leading to a possible wait period before your children are ready.

Lila Donnovan is the pen name of a 6^th grader whose writing has appeared under her real name in two anthologies published by 826 Seattle:  When a Sentence Ends in a Surprising Gazebo and Adventures in Reading. She has, in fact, met Lemony Snicket.

Blueprints for Building Better Girls by Elissa Schappell

When I pick up a collection of short stories, I don't assume that I'll read it straight through. I apply my "if it doesn't grab me by x page, I'll stop" rule to each story and then skip some, enjoy some, and move through the collection that way. Though this is my usual practice with collections, there are some I'll never forget because they offer story after story that grab my full attention and refuse to let go.

It's not a long list: Who I Was Supposed to Be by Susan Perabo, We're in Trouble by Christopher Coake, The Coast of Good Intentions by Michael Byer, and The  Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie.  Though Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout and A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan are considered "novels in stories," they count here, too, because each chapter/story can stand alone as short fiction and, if I wanted to read them from back to front or if I wanted to read the chapters/stories in a random order, they'd still be just as good.

Blueprints for Building Better Girls by Elissa Schappell is the latest collection to make it on the list (okay, it's not the shortlist for any big literary prize, but it's joining some lovely compatriots). I'm not sure I'm even qualified to write about this collection because I bulldozed my way through it rather than slowly savoring each story in its turn. But I must blame the writer for this: I wasn't prepared for my relaxing evening ritual of reading a few pages before sleep to be utterly co-opted by forceful and indelible stories that are still threading their way through my thoughts.

This is a collection of stories focused on women who, on the surface, might appear to (kind of) have it  together, but who are as real and flawed and funny and desperate as the rest of us real women are. Schappell's characters cover the gamut of modern women's roles, chosen or not: mothers, wives, daughters, good girls, sluts, partiers, victims, bitches, BFFs. What makes the stories so powerful is that we recognize ourselves or our friends or our acquaintances in these characters. We know these women. We cringe and sympathize and laugh and feel relief as we catch a  peek into their lives, knowing how real these lives are, the fiction label notwithstanding.

Blueprints for Building Better Girls is made up of eight linked stories. They don't fit together in a particular style or chronology, but Schappell has built in connections, sometimes quite subtle, that tie them together. In one story you'll glimpse a character from another. In a different story characters reference a situation or recall a memory from a story that you've already read, and so on. In this way, a community of women is created and readers feel a sense of loyalty to the characters because we can see the web of shared experience that ties them together, even in the frailest of ways.

So, it's a collection of short stories about women characters...would men want to read it? Well, I'd certainly recommend it anyone who likes kick-ass short stories. But, I'll let Elissa Schappell answer this question for me. Here is the answer she gave for the same question an interview for The Rumpus during which she was asked, "Do you think men read your books?"

"It seems like men are reading this book. Or, every man who has read it has decided write me. Which is lovely. Perhaps it’s because reviewers—and these are good reviews, some written by women—keep writing about how 'provocative' and 'darkly funny' they are (which perhaps can be construed as naughty and mean?) as well as 'full of unsympathetic female characters,' who are inevitably cited as being unstable, depressed, dangerous… In my experience men are mad for female characters who are liable to pop off without warning. 

Perhaps it’s the title? Maybe they assume the book contains actual plans for how to build your own horny nubile robot? No, it’s because it’s been proven that women seeing a man reading my book immediately assume, He must be incredibly smart and great in bed.

Seriously, though, this is all about conflating gender with genre. It’s bullshit. I’ve examined books by Hemingway and Austen with a high powered microscope and failed to find evidence of any genitalia, male or female on either."

Amen, Sister.

A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano

In A Good Hard Look Napolitano has created a vivid and sympathetic fictional portrait of the iconic American writer Flannery O'Connor and her small hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia.  Around O'Connor revolves a cast of characters whose lives intersect, as they will in a small town, but it is the choices they make that inexorably pull them together in ways they'd never intend.

There's Southern beauty, Cookie Himmel, who has returned in triumph from a stint in New York City with a handsome and wealthy fiance, Melvin, in tow. Melvin believes he will found a purpose for his life in his marriage and in this small town, but he quickly discovers that the only lively company he can find is Flannery, whom Cookie  has forbidden him to visit. Melvin can't understand Cookie's animosity to a woman who is basically an invalid, but Cookie has her reasons.  We also meet unhappy Lona, the bored wife of a local policeman, who frets against the limitations of her life but doesn't know any other way to live. Minor characters that fill out the social and cultural life of Milledgeville round out and deepen the impact of even the smallest of interactions between the central figures of the story.

Napolitano opens a window on the life of this idyllic, sleepy Southern town and shows us that even the most ordered of lives can harbor the emotional underpinnings of tragedy: jealousy, complacency, and dishonesty.  That ill-considered choices, even those that appear innocent, can lead to irrevocable consequences. That grace and forgiveness, though hard fought, can be found when we're willing to face up to what we have done.

Though Flannery O'Connor is a central character in this novel, you don't have to be familiar with her writing or even her own story to become fully immersed in A Good Hard Look. It is very likely, however, that you'll  want to know more about O'Connor and about her writing once you've finished this novel. (Unless, of course, you decide to simply turn back to the first page and start all over again.)

Further Resources:

Ann Napolitano has a beautiful website where you can learn more about A Good Hard Look and where you can read her very interesting blog Lives Well Lived. I hope you'll take a few minutes to explore it, especially the post about Flannery O'Connor.

Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor is a fascinating and highly readable biography of O'Connor. Highly recommended.

"Just One Line" by Guest Blogger Nancy Schatz Alton

“The moment of change is the only poem.” –Adrienne Rich

I don’t recall when I first heard this line of poetry. I am guessing it was in college; perhaps the semester I took poetry. Ironically, during those fourteen weeks, I grew to hate ordered stanzas after a lifelong love of verse. The teacher was didactic. My papers came back covered in red pen and pencil markings. It seems I wasn’t allowed to take words meant to be together apart. I recall the teacher asking what a few lines of a certain poem meant, and no one guessed the right answer. With as much glee as an aging, hair-thinning, glasses-wearing, tall, skinny professor can muster, he sang out, “She’s talking about loving a woman! She’s a lesbian!”

Who knows if my memory spits out the exact words he said. But sitting in my hard chair that day, I decided to give up poetry and to back out of my English major. I didn’t have an inkling about what the professor said the poem described. There was no room in his syllabus for giving words new meanings based on the reader’s experience. That poem I have long since forgotten, but I bet it was an Adrienne Rich poem.

But still. And yet. Her personal bedroom preference wasn’t why her poetry mattered. It was the way the words flowed through my brain as I read them. It was exactly this line that caught me and continues to catch me more times than I can count on two hands: “The moment of change is the only poem.”

As a Midwestern, suburban-raised Catholic girl, I had an interesting relationship to change. I both yearned for it and feared it. I wanted out. I wanted up and away from the two blocks I biked around again and again: the small block, with two tiny hills, and the big block, with two tiny hills. I desired to know people outside of my worldview; there was no way I was going to a Catholic college populated by the same type of kids I went to high school with. My box, my box, I wanted to break out of the box I had built around myself, even if back then I thought others had more to do with the box than they really did.

So off I went to my liberal college that flew the United Nations flag. At orientation week, every time someone heard I was from Minnesota, they turned and walked away. A few feet away from me there might be an international student, someone from D.C., or a merit scholar from San Francisco. My state heritage was not compelling, although I was a novelty because I was naïve and I could say “about” with a thick accent, just like the people in the movie “Fargo.”

And poetry was going to be how I changed the world. I meant to be a poet. Until I took that poetry class and my fear of growing into my own word-laced skin overtook my desire.  I didn’t take more than one creative writing class and I never mustered up the necessary courage needed for seeking a job at the student newspaper.  

Reading Adrienne Rich’s line about change, though, that stuck with me even after I turned away from writing. I was scared shitless of any part of the world that I did not have advanced knowledge of. I suffered from clinical depression during my senior year of high school and throughout my senior year of college. Of course, there were so many reasons for this, but mostly, it was fear. I thought I wouldn’t get into or survive college. I believed I would never get a decent job on the real planet.  The moment of change is the only fear. What would happen when I left my beloved college campus behind?

Well, I took Adrienne’s words with me, and I used them like a mantra every time my life seemed to move too fast into the future. These words helped me hold onto my hat, whether I wore a baseball cap or a hand-knit striped beanie. And I wrote. I wrote through all those hard times. When I reread words from any difficult time, I am struck by the strength of my verse and the fierceness of my personhood. I was never going to lose myself, really, if I just kept writing through every hard situation: my first years in the real world, working in a bookstore and a restaurant; moving west to Seattle without laying eyes on it first; taking my first writing class when I decided it was time to live my dream; having my first child; dealing with my second child’s dyslexia. Always, the words saved me when fear beat me within inches of being depressed again.

And while Adrienne’s words aren’t a daily mantra, they really mean something to me. The meaning of this line keeps changing as I keep evolving. When I was in my 20s and moving into my first house, I asked my Aunt Susie to embroider this line of poetry. I framed it and placed it by my front door. How ironic that I immortalize in embroidery the words of ardent feminist Adrienne Rich who, in a famous poem, referred to her aunt’s needlework as symbolic of women’s marginal place in society. But that wall hanging centered me as I walked out the door to my first writing job, often thinking my editor would one day tell me it isn’t true, I’m not a writer, “Pack up your desk and go home.”

Yes, it sounds silly, but here I sit at 41, still using her line of poetry to brace myself to face reality. The world changes so fast and change still feels so uneasy so often. I still think someone will find out I’m an imposter. I’ve written two books and held down numerous writing jobs, but fear still lives inside of me. Editors still ask me to write things I just don’t get right even on the third try. My husband tells me I just need to adapt. He’s right. I’ll morph into the writer the job is asking me to be, and the moment that happens, well I may not even recognize it, but I will know once again my fear has dissipated, and I have settled into my role. And that, my friend, is poetry.

 Nancy Schatz Alton is a Seattle-based freelance writer and editor. She has written two holistic health care guides: The Healthy Back Book and The Healthy Knees Book. Find her essays at www.withinthewords.com.