The Next Dark Age

Book 39

Marilynne Robinson won the Pulitzer for Gilead, a novel about the life of a small town minister.  Home is about the family of his neighbor, another minister.  There is a prodigal son returning and a daughter that is afraid she will never leave and a dying old man with a heart full of love and kindness who has a lot of regrets.

Seriously, if a guy can live such a life – big family, called to service, happy marriage, all virtuous and stuff – and still feel so much regret then I am totally doomed.

We have the themes of kindness and redemption.  Certainly judgement.  But the big thing is that it is really hard to understand other people’s demons.

I didn’t love this the way I loved Gilead.  It is a little bit too Lifetime Movie.  The character of Glory is a little bit too good/kind/forgiving and a little bit too weepy for me to take seriously.  But the crossover of the characters makes me want to re-read Gilead and pay particular attention to Jack.  Maybe it will come together better that way.

Book 38

This was another YA novel doing a sort of memoir of a character – in this case Obi Wan Kenobi.  The set up is that he left a journal in his cave on Tatooine and Luke found it when he went back to rescue Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt.

Alrighty then.

I didn’t learn a whole lot here.  It seems that Luke had only met Ben twice before in his life before the droids landed on Tatooine.  And there is a strong sense of remorse in his assumption that Anakin was irredeemable.    Bot mostly, this book pulled together the mythology from the films and a bunch of the novels and printed it in one place.  I guess there is some value to that.

Book 37

I would have missed this short novel if it hadn’t been for the Introduction by Ann Patchett.  She was in “the world’s smallest used book store” while on vacation when a friend pulled it out and made her read it.  She loved it and that was good enough for me.

Old man on his deathbed in Ireland confesses his secret to his priest:  His wife of 50 years is not really his wife.  Before he can tell the entire story, he dies.  The priest will not leave the wife alone until he has the whole story.

The story is that she is is sister.  They had a bit of a Flowers in the Attic with an abusive father and ran away from home as young teenagers.  Telling people they were married was easier than telling the truth and the rest was history.

As the lady tells the story – which included one sordid detail when the kids were locked in the frozen bedroom while daddy went on a bender – it feels like the priest is only interested in sordid details.  So she catches him all the way up to when they came to live in their present town and the priest keeps pushing.  She is shocked.  There was only that one incident of “sin” other than the sin of omission in their true relationship.  She is offended at his assumption that there is more and he leaves.

So the story is about judgment.  And rushing to judgment.  And Right vs. Wrong and who the Hell decides that, anyway?

SPOILER

The priest figures out that his “imagination” has done the greatest evil and seeks forgiveness.

So yeah.  I was sort of assuming there would be more ugliness and drama.  Rushing to judge a book, if you will.  And boy was I wrong.  The simplicity was the power of the story.

Book 36

The Horse Boy is the memoir of a journey that was made into a documentary a few years back.  Rupert Isaacson is the father of an autistic son, who found a glimmer of hope in the boy’s connection with a horse.  This leads to an epic journey to Mongolia, riding horses and meeting with shamans that try to heal him.

Why yes, it does sound totally insane.  Don’t judge.

The first chapters, including the description of the first time Rowan meets a horse, are intense.  Made more intense by the fact that Isaacson reads the audio version himself. As he describes the idea for the journey..riding horses to the middle of nowhere Outer Mongolia with a six year old autistic boy..well.  I was feeling for his wife.   The documentary funded the trip.

The thing Isaacson does really well is relate the tension of living with an autistic child.  How you never know when there will be a tantrum and when it will be ok.  And when there will be a potty accident.  I remember at one point thinking that it was tiresome to listen to – except that is sort of the point.  How exhausting that must be.

Also interesting is the theories from the shamans on the cause of Rowan’s autism.  Spirit of a dead grandmother.  Karma from daddy’s fox hunting.  Mom swimming in some bad lake water.  The parents dutifully attacked each thing that could be attacked.  But the common thing they said was that Rowan was destined to be a shaman himself.

The milestones relayed are impressive.  Rowan making his first friend.  Riding by himself.   Reasoning – no tantrums.  And OMG with the “indoor poopie!”

The takeaway for me was that autism is different for every family and whatever the hell works can only be a good thing.

Book 35

The Year of Magical Thinking was my introduction to Joan Didion.  Part of the heartbreak of that memoir (the subject of which was grieving a lost husband) was knowing that by the time the book was published, their daughter would also have died.  Blue Nights talks about Quintana.

Didion suggests in the book that this isn’t exactly what she meant to write.  (And the people on the Internet that have written about it don’t seem to agree on its subject, either.)  I suggest that it is about finding/maintaining/regaining one’s equilibrium.  She uses something akin to stream of consciousness (without the annoying punctuation issues) in her storytelling and goes back to certain lines to illustrate the themes.  Actually, it isn’t stream of consciousness – she tells a complete story.  She completes many of her thoughts.  She just bounces about a lot before returning to a main thread.

She talks about adoption.  She talks about aging.  About aging alone.  About the “comfort” of memories – and living in an apartment crammed with mementos she can’t bear to look at or to throw away.  I can positively feel her trying to sort it all out.

“Blue Nights” refers to the evenings right around the summer solstice where evenings seem very blue, rather than black.  I’ve only particularly noticed them in the last couple of years in the backyard with the dogs.  But when she writes about having missed them one year when she was in diagnostic hell, I understood the sadness.

Another moment that resonated was toward the end.  She was talking about a hospital wanting an emergency contact, and she had trouble naming one.  Husband gone, daughter gone.  Most family on the other coast.  Other family and friends travel heavily.

At seventy-something years old, who is her person?

Finally, as she noted the date of Quintana’s death – August 26, 2005 – I realized that today was the anniversary.   I hope she can find some peace.

Book 34

The fifth book in the Sookie Stackhouse series of True Blood fame.  It was fun.

While no new supernatural species were introduced, we spent a lot of time with the shifters – werewolves and others.  A sniper is hunting them.  Fine, then.

We learn some more about the politics of werewolves.

Ew.

Sookie kissed, schmecked or otherwise generated annoying sexual tension with a good half dozen men.  Four shifters and two vampires, if I remember correctly.

The laugh out loud moment came courtesy of Pam, Eric’s awesomely tactless awesome progeny.  Sookie received a bouquet of flowers with a card that read something like:

Don’t get shot anymore.

From The Gang at Fangtasia

That about sums it up.

Book 33

Reading this novel was like eating vegetables.  I knew it was good for me, but…

An American teacher is a “dynamiter” in the Spanish Civil War.  His assignment is to blow a bridge and he is sent to a band of guerillas that are to help him.  Of course, they each have their stories and they are all war-weary at the very beginning.   So the tension builds to the inevitable bombing, with the question who lives and who dies all along the way.

Hemingway has his sweeping themes of death and loyalty and suffering and hopelessness.  He does a fine job of explaining just why in hell the American is fighting with the Spanish Communists.  (It was really more fighting against fascists.)

No big surprise, but I found the love story tiresome.  It stands to illustrate the “live for the moment” aspect of war time.  For a band of guerillas, anyway.  I also found the bullfighting stories tiresome.  Shocker.

By the end, I was mostly interested in the plot points.  Is the mission a success, and who survives.  I don’t think that would bother the Old Man too much.

Book 32

This was my own pick for my book club and it took me far longer to get through that it should have.  The concept is great – at the core of three battling religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) there is some commonality and it is embodied in the form of this guy, Abraham.  So dude goes on a quest to find the ways that each religion understands (and uses) him and asks himself whether through sharing this guy, three religions might find some things to agree upon.

I’m going with “No”.  Because you know what these religions really have in common?  They manipulate the language of the ancient stories for whatever purpose suits them on any given day.

All three.

Feiler does a fine job through his travels in the Middle East of finding expert theologians to walk him through the importance of Abraham to their faiths.  He also notes that people see in religious texts whatever they want to see, and find things that prove their points, rather than really searching for meaning.

The same might be said of my reading his book.

Toward the end, as he is really trying to answer the “is there hope?” question, he makes an observation.  (Maybe someone else said it and he recorded it.)  The Catholic Church didn’t start to soften its stance on freakin’ anything until Vatican II.    Part of the driver of Vatican II was the American Catholics – more liberal, more prosperous, more willing to speak up.  The theory is that these things came about because the American Catholics we raised in a stable political environment that through its lack of (official) association with any given faith was more open to others.  Perhaps if those political institutions can take root in the Middle East, there will be some hope.

I’m not sure I will see it in my lifetime.