2015 Book List

(not in order)
My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante
A tale for the time being, Ruth Ozeki
The Door, Magda Szabo

Brown Girl Dreaming, Jaqueline Woodson

Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill

Billy Lynn's Long Half Time Walk,
Reading Like A Writer, Francine Prose
Asunder, Close Ardjis
The Short Tragic Lift of Robert Pace
Brain on Fire, Susannah Cahalan

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, Dinaw Mengetsu

Boys In The Boat

Favorite: A Tale for the Time Being

2nd:Boys in the boat & Billy Lynn 

2014 Booklist

2014 Book List

Goldfinch
Sense of an ending
American Wife
House in the sky
Orphan Master's Son
The Painter
Transatlantic
Americanah 

Book of the Year:

Orphan Master's Son

2 for 1

Ok, I'm super behind again.

During the annual weekend away, an accounting was done of the books from this year and it turns out I missed the write up for The Snow Child.  So here we go:

The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey

Fiction is so wonderful when it can make you set aside what you know to be real and allow you to live in a world where anything is possible.  It's Alaska in the 1920's and Jack and Mabel are barely making it.  He works and works and works to keep their Alaska homestead alive and she's doing her part but lonely and heartbroken for the child they didn't have.  They find a moment to play in the snow and form a snow child.

Either through magic or fortune soon they encounter Faina, a lovely girl with blonde hair and a fox for a friend.  Faina saves them, or they save her - either way it's charming and regardless of all the evidence it's never really clear if she's real.

Among our group there was great debate upon the meaning of the ending of this tale, which leads me to believe that the ending was intentionally misleading. Consensus was positive on this particular book.


Weekend away!

Every year we try to plan two extra curricular activities.  The first is the spouse dinner.  This is a challenge to find a night when fourteen people can gather at one time and child care can be obtained for eleven shorties.  We've managed it for the last four years and will keep booking it.

The other event is even harder to arrange.  A weekend where we ladies zip away from our broods and gather in a cozy cottage to dine on chocolate and other yummy foods, hike, do some yoga and of course, talk about the book du jour.   Last year, we were warned away from our hosts cabin in Leavenworth because of late season fires and terrible air quality and this year an early winter storm kept us on the west side of the state.  Lucky for us, our group has some great connections and we fell into comfortable lodgings both times.   This year found us in a charming water front cabin on Vashon Island that snuggly sleeps twelve or very comfortably sleeps seven.

 

One of the things about the cabin that added to its wonderfulness is that you can't simply drive to the door.  There is a group parking lot and then you have to walk about a third of a mile to the 11th house on the shore.  The walk was quiet and with each step the hustle of life "on land" faded away.

Our book for discussion was "How To Be a Woman".   Part memoir, part stand alone essays on feminism it opened the door for a lengthy discussion on topics that we ladies seldom get into with each other.

I'm sure it would be an easy thing to assume that when gals get together and shut the door they talk about body hair, dating and their weight.  We really don't delve into those areas very often.

Filled with funny moments and a rather long discussion about what to name your vagina (Oh yes, I went there.) this isn't the Susan B. Anthony women's suffrage version of feminism.  It's a straight forward look at our lives today and what it means as we navigate a world where we have to balance people like Kim Kardashian who are famous for goodness knows what, and Nancy Pelosi who is demonized for I'm not sure what maybe being a prickly woman with opinions and being moms, women who have serious jobs.  We're told that we're equal, but the tend to typically fill the board room in the Communications and Human Resources positions.

While the book evoked a long discussion that lasted well into Sunday, we soundly didn't think we liked the author.  The tone of the book was chatty and casual.  Perhaps that's her way of balancing the deep topics she was tackling.

I do give her kudos for not shying away from an unpopular topic.  She and her husband chose to terminate a pregnancy after they had other children.  She writes about this with complete openness and acknowledgement that her decision will be (was) questioned and reviled by many.

Still Alice

As food themes go, I'd like some credit for finding a wine called "Educated Guess" for a story about a Harvard professor with early-onset Alzheimer disease.

With that out of the way, let's talk about this book.

Heartbreaking, amazing, moving, scary and thought provoking.  These are just some of the comments from last nights discussion.

Alice is a respected and beloved Harvard professor who is asked to speak all over the world.  She notices that her reliance on her notes is becoming critical, so she gets it checked out.  The diagnosis, early onset Alzheimer's.

We follow her through the journey of telling her husband, her kids, having to step down at work and the shrinking of her social and physical world.   We are equally frightened of the truth regarding her situation and the terrible impact to Alice and her family.

Because the story is told from her perspective, as things become confusing or 'new' to her our understanding of the narrative shifts.  At first Alice is giving us the nuanced details of a complicated mother & daughter dynamic which eventually devolves into her describing her daughter as that woman with the baby.

Some of us powered through this book in a couple sittings and were moved to tears (me publicly on an airplane) and others were so torn apart by the devastation that they had to read it in small chunks just to not be brokenhearted.

Our appreciation for the research and effort put into this book is great.  We can understand why it is recommended to the caregivers of patients with early-onset Alzheimer's.  

This type of Alzheimer's has a high probability of being genetic, and if you have the gene the likelihood of developing the disease is almost certain.  The author explored the implications of these facts with Alice's three children.  Would you want to know?  It's hard to say.

Our discussion moved to assisted suicide, to estate planning and to the dreaded question of 'who will raise our kids if we're gone.  So many real life issues.

 The book was so well done that it is easy to think of it as non-fiction.  That's a compliment Miss Lisa Genova.  Good work!

Albert of Adelaide

Wanted!

If you want to sound like a crazy person, please describe the book Albert of Adelaide to someone.

Well, it's about this platypus who escapes from a zoo and heads to the Australian outback and along the way is embroiled in an old western shoot out, makes friends with a wombat and has to deal with a gang of kangaroos, thieves and deadly dingoes.  Yes, a gun slinging platypus.

It's been a while since we've read a western, and this one is superb.  The author Howard Anderson has written a fun, and engaging novel.

Our discussions ranged from surprise over the depth of appreciation for the story and the depth of character development to the nuances of social norms and mythical stature that grows when you only know one dimension about an individual.

  

And The Mountains Echoed

Khaled Hosseini has produced a third book that is equally worth reading.  Author of the Kite Runner and A thousand splendid suns, Hosseini tells us a winding story of intersecting lives that spans continents, generations and families.

Each chapter is told from a different persons point of view and slowly the truth about a father's dreadful choice becomes known and the broad impact unfolds.

We enjoyed this book and I'm sorry to have to admit that it's been 3 or 4 months since our discussion and any remarkable or notable comments from the group have been pushed aside in my memory.

We did note that the style of story telling was remarkably different than his other two novels, and that it took a while for some of us to realize that he was never going to circle back and repeat a narrator.  Freed of that expectation, the story began to crystallize as the characters started overlapping into the chapters and the overall story became clear.

Quiet The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

Shhh

Oh my, this book set some of our hair on fire and it has seems to have themes that will be popping up all year long.

Ms. Cain has researched and written an interesting book about some of the most powerful people in our collective history.  She writes generously about people like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Charles Schwab, Gandhi, and Eleanor Roosevelt who have made enormous impacts on the world even though they would more likley prefer to spend time with a friend than attend a gala in their honor.

Ms. Cain theorizes that society tends to reward the likes of Tony Robbins' and Dale Carnegie over those of us who would rather eat our shoe than speak publicly.

It was interesting to go around the room and let each of us describe where we fall on the introvert / extrovert scale.  Many of us called ourselves ambiverts as we embrace  equal number of introvert and extrovert tendencies. (There was an assessment in the book.)   An ambivert is  likely to be excited to attend a party, but instantly wants to escape upon arrival if social groups have already formed.

The book describes several people and their experiences, the authors dread of public speaking, a parents attempts to help their 'shy' child and a married couple's struggle with how often to entertain.



Ms. Cain lost some of our members with her unflattering descriptions of extroverts.  As detailed as she was with the nuances of the varied introverts in our midst she surprised us with sweeping generalizations and statements to the effect that extroverts are easily distracted by bright shiny things, overconfident, impulsive, and prone to divorce.  Obviously there is more to her research regarding extroverts, but the minimal attention to positive traits was offensive to our most outspoken extrovert.  Of course as she started to loudly blather on about her indignation we dangled a silver Christmas ornament and a cookie and she quickly lost her train of thought.  See, she's an extrovert, but clearly not very bright.

The purpose of the book wasn't to delve into extroverts so perhaps we're misguided in getting lost in this point.

Towards the end of the book Ms. Cain gives some interesting advice to parents and educators regarding how introverts react differently to things like group projects.   She also gives tips for public speaking that are actually pretty good and don't start with "how to fake your own death to get out of talking to a crowd."

It's clear that one point is that we shouldn't count the quiet person out as a valuable contributor, because you never know what's going on with them: