January's Book Reads

Rather than wait for the end of the year and try and remember everything I read, I am approaching it on a monthly basis this year. Here are the books I read in January:



Rite of Passage
This was the book that started it all for me—"all" being my life-long love affair with science fiction. I read this in Middle School, one of the 70's "open schools," hiding out in the attic where I used to go to escape the hustle and overwhelm of classes without walls, teachers without attendance lists, and Becky without friends. The story is about a 14 year old girl who is smarter than average and finds her way through a very grueling rite of passage on a far future ship where the coming of age ritual is one of the ways population is kept trim. I think I really related to this girl and to a society that figures out what your special skills are and cultivates them, at a time when I felt very much lost in the mob and undervalued because of my non-cute cheerleader status.

It is the third time I have reread it and it still holds together as a very good book. Notice that it is still in print! However, I don't recall comprehending the terrible power of the ship and the questionable morality of its rule. Just the story of the girl...

I'm not sure if I read this or Asimov's  I, Robot first, but either way I was hooked. However, I Robot does not work as a re-read. How did we ever swallow that level of sexism and stereotyping?



The next book I read was for the Book Club, and it was an author whose work I had read in the 80's and loved and admired. Andrea Barrett has an enormous gift for bringing to life the powerful passion of natural scientists in eras gone by, just skirting historical luminaries with secondary fictional characters whose stories illuminate the wonder and genius of scientific investigation. Archangel: Fiction did indeed uphold this premise, but the stories were darker, even grim, and leave the reader with a feeling of having just glimpsed a life that has somehow gone amiss. And sometimes even that is not conclusive. The other readers in my group similarly felt let down by the stories, and some even suffered through them.



As I mentioned in my year-end-books post, I am always searching for the eminently readable yet literary detective novel that will take me through at least 20 books of page-turning enjoyment. And, friends (if you are out there), I think I've found it for 2014. Not new at all, just new to me, I discovered Patricia Cornwell's Dr. Kay Scarpetta detective novels, starting with Postmortem (Kay Scarpetta Mysteries). Grisly, gripping, compelling—they are excellent and rife with really interesting scientific and medical data as well as great characters. Not for the faint of heart, I even reached a point in the book where I wasn't sure I really wanted to be reading this level of gruesome detail, but a quick look at the reviews, including the fact that Postmortem won the the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony and Macavity Awards and the French Prix du Roman d'Adventure,  convinced me to keep going and I am now 5 books into the series with Body of Evidence, All That Remains: A Scarpetta Novel (Kay Scarpetta), and Cruel and Unusual also behind me and the series hasn't disappointed yet.



On a much lighter note in the detective genre, the next book in the Flavia De Luce series, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches: A Flavia de Luce Novel is out, and as promised Amazon delivered it right after publication from our pre-order. My daughter "Fat Rabbit" and I traded it back and forth and were both delighted to continue the adventures of Flavia, though we agreed this one had some flaws that earlier ones did not, jumping around all over the grounds for no apparent reason, cutting of certain apparent plot lines, but eventually resolving in a very satisfying way that leaves us to await the further adventures of Flavia, girl chemist and private detective.


And just for fun I indulged in the latest escapades of Bridget Jones in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy who to my delight managed to maintain her youthful personality and madcap-ness into her, gasp, 50's! Helen Fielding manages to pull off another plot variation of the age old Darcy gets girl, wiht a few oops along the way and lots of fun and I did actually catch myself laughing out loud while reading it waiting in line somewhere.



Because I am a great fan of Ann Patchett's after hearing her speak at Writers Center Stage last year,  I went out and got her new collection of essays, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Well the girl can write, and each essay is really a perfect gem. However the whole book en masse starts feeling like a little too much of the perfect point of view. They say every Rabbi has one sermon and every writer has one story, and when the essays are strung together in this way, I started feeling that one-story repetition, just because it is the SAME person telling each (wonderful) story. I am sure it is just me because the reviews are insanely wonderful. But I would recommend reading one of these each month, to be brought into the freshness, humor and clarity of Patchett's world anew, rather than over and over again, and then it would be fun each time.

I shout out to "Fat Rabbit," (as always, names changed to protect the innocent) my daughter and fellow book worm, who reads on the bus, at the dinner table and even while walking to school—for helping me sort my reading pile. We both are always ordering books at the library, going to pick them up and returning with everything we ordered plus an additional pile. And we both wind up having several piles that we circle in confusion, wasting precious reading time trying to figure out which book we are actually reading. In a moment of inspiration, during one recent snow day, she suggested we sort our piles and decide IN ADVANCE what we are reading next. It has served us both very well. Here are our piles—white slips of paper are stand ins for books we have in our Kindles so that they are in the queue as well. Thank you Fat Rabbit!

DANCECleveland: Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet

Our second show in this year's DanceCleveland subscription had my husband Irad, his business partner Yuval, and me chipping our way out of our home glacier and sliding and skidding between snowdrifts to the Ohio Theater downtown.

It was well worth the effort. Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet has a unique situation amongst contemporary dance companies: Generously funded by Walmart heiress Nancy Laurie, the company owns its own studio building in Manhattan, is able to pay its dancers 52 weeks a year (unheard of in the dance world), and bring in resident choreographers to develop pieces with the dancers for 5-9 weeks at a time, often including the input of individual dancers into the final project.

The experience of coming in from a weekend of huddling in hibernation at home to the high energy urban excitment of Cedar Lake was really to leave one world and enter another. The first dance, Indigo Rose, introduced us to the elegant athleticism of the company. Four different selections of music, ranging from avant garde to Couperin, amazing costumes, high tech lighting, shadow dancing with a billowing scrim, multi media projections. And the dancers! So young and vital, multi-ethnic and acrobatic—like watching pan-global acrobats. I felt like I had come to the Blade Runner of Dance Companies.



The second dance, 10 Duets on the Theme of Rescue, as usual for the middle act, was slower, and intensely emotional. Couple after couple enacting scenes of intimacy and drama.



And the third dance was a masterpiece of acrobaticism and group movement, like watching a huge sea amoeba composed of beautiful bodies. It is intense, humorous, anxious and passionate and is thematically based on New York City.



I have come to love DANCECleveland and every time I go my appreciation deepens. I went home and read their history, which goes back to 1954 and is quite remarkable. Apparently, appearing in the DANCECleveland series is an important stop for a contemporary dance company. In addition to being one of the only stand-alone dance presenters in the country, they add many creative features to each presentation: workshops and classes by each company with local students the days before a performance, a 45 minute talk before each performance, Q and A afterwards, and little post-it notes on each program to be filled out by the audience with their impressions and takeaways. The post-its go up on a board during intermission and one can see what other people experience. The act of reflecting on what was just seen deepens my relationship to it and sets my impressions and recollections —I may borrow this trick for presenting sessions in my own organization.

We stayed for the Q and A and had a fascinating glimpse into the process of the company and some of their vocabulary: flexible spines, athleticism, heads as a fifth appendage...They also mentioned that they have a nice blog of their travels that I did look at when I got home. Additionally we lingered afterward and had a wonderful conversation with Pam Young, their executive director, who does an amazing job of curating this series. We all agreed that this is a golden age of contemporary dance and we are lucky enough to have 5-7 cream of the crop companies brought to our doorstep every year.

Feeling energized and inspired, we went a few blocks down Euclid to Noodlecat where we sat at counters in the pub area and feasted on saki and sapporo and okonomi yaki, and steamed buns and noodles, laying in enough blubber to get us through the next few days of the cold snap, and thanks to DANCECleveland, feeling connected to a world of artistic excellence, technological innovation and ever evolving new aesthetics, to which with the help of all that Saki, we left all fired up to see what next we can experience, and even create ourselves. A good night out in Arctic Cleveberg.

Polar Dog Walk

 The call of the woods?

Walking the dog has been a real issue at our house this winter with the temperatures often double degree below zero (with wind chill.) This morning I decided to take it on as a winter sport.

t

The proper attire is very important. Here I am suiting up: jeans and T shirt, sweater, ski pant overalls, fleece hoodie, TWO layers of gloves (key!), ski mask, faux fur-lined boots. Self photography limits the view I can offer.

 Parka on top. Notice the blue, pre-dawn light in the window.

 Here is Lucy suiting up.

Setting out in the blue pre-dawn light.

And she's off....

 The sky lightening.

Dawn through the trees

Amazing contrast.

 Happy Dog.

Fresh snow goes a long way towards making the cold bearable and even beautiful. With the proper gear, it is a treat to be outside. Such a lovely way to bring in the day. 

 

Lucy agrees.

 

The Weather

Really? The weather? Is that all there is to talk about?

Truth is when the thermometer says:

10°F

FEELS LIKE -3°

it becomes hard to think about much else. 

 

How am I going to pump gas when I don't have gloves in the car? I better leave 10 minutes early to make sure (child) does not stand outside. Do I really have to drag the garbage can all the way down to the street? Who is going to walk the dog when it is like suiting up for a radiation decontamination protocol?

The views from my windows are pretty monochromatic

 I have an increased reluctance to go out anywhere.

I really really want to read. A lot!

Soups, tea, stews, warm comfort foods...and lots of them. Compulsions to bake. And to eat.

High cuddle-to-kid ratio when we are all home. 

Only four more months to go...

 

Afternoon Tea for a Winter's Day

What do you do when the weather looks like this and the temperature with wind chill is 15 degrees? And there isn't even the romance of pretty snow on the ground?

 Afternoon tea!  In America we often call this high tea, but actually in England it is low tea because it was consumed in the afternoon to stave off hunger before the late meal, on low tables.

First stop, the bakery. I went to Luna Bakery Cafe, in Cleveland Heights, started by pastry chef Bridget Thibeault last year. Conveniently located right under my yoga studio, (Green Tara Yoga,) I frequently stop in for a cup of coffee and a bite to eat after class.

The cases are always filled with beautiful pastries baked on the premises (the bakery is visible through large windows on the street, and you can stand and watch the pastry chefs at work.)

I chose savory turnovers, fruit galettes, apple oatmeal squares, and a mini blueberry lemon bundt cake.





Then the fun of setting it up for tired hungry school children, coming in from the cold with icy toes and snow-dusted hair. The temperatures were plunging, snow started falling,  and the table was set with our Fortnum and Mason tea set, cups of creamed cauliflower soup, sliced fruit and the bakery goodies, along with tea ("Celebration Blend") brought back from England.

That is one way to beat the winter blues!

Books: My 2013 Reading Inventory

Please Note: To see graphic images of the books you need to disable ad-blocker, at least for the duration of reading this blog.

If you know me you know I like to read. I don't go to sleep at night without reading, even if it is for 30 seconds before my eyes close—it just doesn't feel like a complete day unless I have read. And when I get into a book, it is the most delicious, wonderful feeling in the world. It may be my favorite thing in the world—a truly excellent book. A book that changes the way you feel and see and think. I book that takes you somewhere else. Language that is so delicious you feel like you can trust the author to do anything. A book that contains a whole other life and/or universe. However, those kinds of book experiences seem to be fewer and further between with age.

Here is what I read in 2013—with some of my impressions and thoughts about them. I am only listing books I feel are worth mentioning—several that I don't even think are worth a mention, even in so modest a setting as my personal blog, are left out.




Bring Up the Bodies (Wolf Hall, Book 2)Part 2 of Wolf Hallby Hilary Mantel. I don't believe it works as a stand alone novel, and it felt rather like additional chapters added on to Wolf Hall. That said, Wolf Hall is one of the most amazing books I've read this past decade. Apparently others agree with me: it won the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Award in 2009, as well as several other awards.

Historical fiction is not the kind of reading I usually go in for.  I read it because my book club (called, ahem, the Book Club) selected it. I was hooked on the first page. The depiction of Thomas Cromwell is so human, modern and touching that he became more real to me than the people around me. I confess to having had a crush on a 16th Century gentleman, which says something about me. Mantel's Cromwell is portrayed as a modern thinker, really almost a democrat, who pulls England and Europe out of the dark ages by his radical capacity to adapt his ideology to changing times, and see people for who they are, regardless of race or rank.

My immersion in Cromwell's world was aided by the fact that I did not actually read Wolf Hall, but listened to it, 18 discs, 23 hours, read by Simon Slater, whose amazing delivery became Cromwell incarnate for me. Towards the end I was up against my book club deadline and out of driving hours so I switched from the recording to the written version, and it lost nothing in the transition.

Bring up the Bodies was just too short to recreate for me the connection to and immersion in of Wolf Hall, but I drank in every word, just to be close to my Thomas again...(Irad doesn't mind seeing as Cromwell is dead, and all).



Having had this amazing experience with Wolf Hall, my book club went on to read Giving Up the Ghost : A Memoir (John MacRae Books), Mantel's memoir.

This was not at all what I expected—I thought it would be a literate and literary memoir of growing up in Britain and the tender experiences of youth that engendered a great writer: an updated, regendered A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Dover Thrift Editions)...and what it actually was is a literate and literary memoir (yes the girl can write) of a life long battle with the medical establishment that leaves her beaten, but not defeated. She triumphs in the telling...

Also in the genre of English fiction, though written by a retired Canadian man who had never been to England, are the absolutely delightful, engaging and scientifically rich Flava de Luce books. Straddling the genre of who-dunnits and young adult lit, they are fit for consumption by all ages, and are refreshingly well written. Flavia, a young genius chemist,  herself is one of my favorite heroines of any genre and my daughter and I eagerly consumed all five books and are breathlessly awaiting our advance order of the the next, which should come out in a few days.

This was an unusual reading year for me in that it did include several memoirs—I usually am strictly available for fiction only. But for some reason, a number of these drifted my way for one reason or another, and I found myself really caught up in the experience of other people's midlife+ meaning-making. Probably because most of them are my age or a little older and I think we are all approaching that time of life when we are summarizing the patterns and looking for the underlying directions in our journeys. You know!

In addition Hilary Mantel's mentioned above, I returned to an old favorite, May Sarton, and read three of her journals: Journal of a Solitude, Plant Dreaming Deep, and The House by the Sea: A Journal. I loved her as much now as I did in my 20's.  And in reading her I find so much of myself: the need to spend time alone, the love of words, the desire to write, fascination with the natural world outside her windows, the intense relationship with building a home and the commitment to arranging fresh flowers as a daily practice. Of course she follows through on all these things in a way which I don't, but then again I am not a lonely, temperamental, single childless writer living by myself in a remote village. I carry these things inside of myself and spend my life being distracted from them  by the far more fortunate banalities of carpooling, producing constant meals for a house full of teenagers, and so on. It is possible to get a taste of May Sarton from a collection of quotes, that someone on Goodreads collected.



My next memoir was Patti Smith's Just Kids, which was also hugely surprising. I have been a fan of Smith's music since my teens, her Horses album one of the iconic records I still keep around in vinyl. But I never knew much about her—I had many assumptions about her that I hadn't realized I carried based on her looks. Druggie, rocker, lesbian...Weird how we attach attributes to a person based on an image and what it signals. She is none of these things. A poet, devotee of Rimbaud, a good Catholic girl and a book collector, she lived with a kind of ascetic purity and devotion to her friend Robert Mapplethorpe and to their art. Her book is beautifully written and by the second page I was in shock. Not a celebrity tell-all but a talented writer with serious chops who beautifully conjures up her girlhood and coming of age. Wow.



The Book Club read the Patti Smith memoir together, and we did something interesting—we each chose another rock memoir (since there was a bumper crop last year) to read additionally and report back on. Mine was Keith Richard's Lifeand it was also quite  mesmerizing. I "met" these rock and roll superstars in my teens and I guess I thought they fell to earth (a la David Bowie) fully formed and cool, but they actually grew up in a gritty, industrial, post-war British landscape and dealt with all the mores and social expectations of the 40's and 50's before breaking out and breaking all the molds and creating the world that we now know as our own. Richards depiction of his childhood brought this reality home to me, in a voice that is earthy, witty and insouciant. Again, not one of those obviously ghost-written formulaic celebrity self aggrandizing memoirs, but a distinct and clear voice with a huge story to tell.

The following three books are lumped together not because I read them sequentially, but because I think they make an excellent counterpart to each other because they all deal with the high techiness of contemporary life in complementary and novel ways:




Alif the Unseen, a really fun romp through the internet and the interface with the world of the djinn told in an un-named Arab totalitarian
 state, with the political commentary embedded in a wonderful fantastical tale.






Little Brother, a cautionary tale that works as a YA novel and a real follow-up to Orwell's 1984 in the world of the near future in which Homeland Security has its digital watchers in everyone's backyard and worse.



The Circlewhich is also a cautionary tale about the possible (likely?) ramifications of the omnipresence of social networking on steroids. This one is really a book of ideas, and the ideas are strong enough to carry it through some of the pedestrian writing and somewhat two dimensional characters.

I would love to teach these books as a course, along with Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book), Reamde: A Novel William Gibson's  Neuromancer, and "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore", discussed below.


I read Ann Patchett's State of Wonder: A Novelafter hearing her speak at Writers Center Stage. She is one of the best writers I have heard speak anywhere, ever, and I was so inspired by her speech that not only did I want to start my own bookstore, but I went out and got her book. And it was a great read! Funny story, an acquaintance of mine told me she couldn't read the book because it was set in the Amazon and she was afraid there would be a snake in it and she has such a severe phobia of snakes she can't even read about them.. I continually reported back to her that it was a great story and there were no snakes...until the penultimate scene in which there is the Mother of All Snake Episodes. So Warning: Disturbing and Graphic Snake Scene.



With the Book Club I also read Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel, which was also a good solid read and another fun and funky merger of high tech and fantastical events would fit into the aforementioned course that I am imagining someone teaching.




And the Book Club read The Interestings: A Novel
 by Meg Wolitzer which I expected to dislike as a remake of the endless list of novels whose conceit is following four roomates after college...this time after summer camp. But it was a pleasant surprise and a really worthwhile and content rich zeitgeist novel for someone the age of...well, me. It was a novel that spanned my whole life and reflected the times I grew up in and lived through, with some interesting twists and turns. The characters were good, some came off the the page more than others. This is our book, guys.



In Rio I borrowed a friend's Kindle (thank you, Yuval) when I decided not to join the group as they voluntarily allowed themselves to be suspended in a flimsy metal car on a cable swinging around in a mid-air going up a mountainside. The only fiction book on it was Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)which I read as a teen-ager but this time round really "got" and appreciated. What a great writer and this belongs on the syllabus of any course on great war literature. (Along with, for example, All Quiet on the Western Front and Catch 22).



And another old friend I revisited (found in a used bookstore in Tel Aviv) is Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories. It is an adult revisit of many of some of the best known fairly tales, and explores the very adult content embedded in them—mythos, fears and erotica—with a dizzying, incisive and sensual prose that was the earmark of this late great writer.



A little gem I found that was of great personal interest was Lyle Rockler's Chazzonos.
 Here is my Amazon Review of the book:

This is a lovely, heartfelt and humble book about the struggles of a cantor who loves his musical heritage and his calling, yet struggles with very real world issues both in and out of the pulpit. The writing is straightforward, honest and brave. The issues will resonate with anyone who has grown up in a traditional or ethnic background and carries the pain of their parents with them. And with anyone who has struggled with marriage and parenthood. And with anyone who cherishes the traditional while suffering the changes of modernity.

As other reviewers said, one doesn't have to be an aficionado of cantorial music to be drawn into the passion of the book - one just has to know what it means to care deeply about art.]

Recommended for cantors and non-cantors alike, certainly for any musician, and for anyone who wants a good "coming-of-age-for-the-second-time-around" story. 

I also slogged my way through Kate Atkinson's Life After Life: A Novel. Certainly a "tour de force"—massive technique and wonderful prose, but so wrenching, to constantly be jerked out of the story and start again. A couple of the iterations of the possible lives of the main character Ursula, were so disturbing that I had to take a long break from the book. There was something intrinsically wrong about re-doing a fictional life, it violates the attachment of the reader to the fiction and reminds you constantly it is not real. It seemed somehow disrespectful on the part of the author to treat their character as an exercise in probability or quantum physics. But dang, it was well done. Worth reading for the beautifully crafted world of early 20th Century England as well.



Kudos to the Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories collection. I read this with daughter Fat Rabbit—we pulled names of several of the authors to find their other books. Some great stories, lots of fun with a really creative genre, and a beautiful binding to boot.



 Doctor Sleep: A Novel, another addition to the Stephen King oeuvre with its massively readable and realistically paranormal explorations of good and evil and everything in between. This one (a sequel to The Shining written 35 years later) is especially good on drinking and the 12 Step program. As a matter of fact, it could be an advertisement for AA. OK, at 544 pages a rather lengthy promotion...

There were lots of "filler" books, mostly detective novels that I pick up and work my way through several in a series, looking for one that can keep me hooked. The best one, which I am 3 books into, is Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford Books, starting with From Doon with Death: The First Inspector Wexford Novel (William Monk). And my usual skipping around sci-fi anthologies, the tomes of Best-ofs that come out every year, as well as my subscription to Asimov's.



And a last minute 2013-read that came in under the wire while I was in Tel Aviv, loaned to me by my cousin Michelle who knows the author, and read on the plane ride home on New Years Eve! The Wayward Moon was a delightful and surprising book. A medieval Yentl, it reminds me of a couple of other "jewish women in historical times" novels that I've read, only so much better! I'm thinking of The Red Tent: A Novel (which I hated; it was pseudo everything!) and People of the Book: A Novel
 by Geraldine Brooks which was half excellent modern novel and half over-romaticized and contrived historical novel, "The Wayward Moon" struck me as a genuine and compelling evocation of another age: an age which has always fascinated me, an age when classical Islamic culture flourished and the fertile crescent and middle east were permeated with learning and arts. Set in 874, it does a bully job of imagining the life of a woman who really was seen as little more than chattel, or even cattle. The story was a breathless adventure tale through every possible scenario the inventive author could come up with, life as a slave, with Muslims,  in a Monastary,  in a roadside Inn (you get the idea) with a very well thought-out and realized character. A 17 year old Jewish woman. Throw those other books out of the Jewish Book Club circuit and grab this one! It is wonderful, and has garnered several prizes to prove it.

That summarizes 2013 in reading. Bring on 2014!

If I were to make only one New Years Resolutions, it would be to read more.