Can't Help Lovin' a Book List

In one of my literature classes recently, as I was introducing the Arthurian legend, I mentioned T. H. White's The Once and Future King, writing it on the board and telling my students, "This is on my top-five list of favorite books ever. After a brief silence, one student piped up, Mrs. Posey, that's at least the eighth book you've mentioned so far this semester that's on your top five list.

They got me! Even if writers stopped writing, I'd never be able to complete even a top 100 list that would remain as the top favorites.

One of my favorite class assignments (there I go waxing hyperbolic again) asked the students to compose their own top ten book list and then share them. The variety of approaches was wonderful. One girl in the class with a long-term boyfriend, also quite a reader, compiled a list of good books for couples to read together. One young man asked if he had to limit the list to ten and came up with a favorite book from each year of school, starting with kindergarten.

In the newest edition of With Rigor for All, a professional publication by NCTE's past president Carol Jago, one of the most prolific readers I know, she has provided a number of good lists in the back--"10 Short Classics for Readers Short on Time," "10 Books for Girls Certain They Will Never Meet Prince Charming," even "10 Most Commonly Stolen Books from My Classroom Library." While I had ready many on her lists (some at her specific recommendation), I realize that now she's made my "to-read" list even longer.

If I were to try to list the books that I love most, those I wish I could get everyone to read, may of them are considered classics. Instead of giving myself a limit, I thought I might just see where the list takes me. Maybe others who read the blog will share your lists too.

Here goes...

T. H. White, The Once and Future King (I already told you. I know.)
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Richard Adams, Watership Down
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
Yann Martel, The Life of Pi
Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Pearl Buck, The Good Earth
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
John Knowles, A Separate Peace
Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
John Irving, The Cider House Rules
Leon Uris, Trinity
Ken Follett, Pillars of the Earth
Daphne DuMaurier, Rebecca

This list is just off the top of my head. An hour from now, I'll think of something I can't believe I omitted. I didn't even begin to mention books from my earlier period of reading (Charlotte's Web, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Little Women, and such).

Listing is one of those exercising in remembering--and sharing. Top five? Top ten? I can't see how!

Can't Help Lovin' a Book List

A Cup of Friendship

This week as bombs have blasted the U. S. Embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan, I was finishing Deborah Rodriguez's novel A Cup of Friendship. I haven't yet read her first book, The Kabul Beauty School, a memoir which, I learned, came under some criticism and claims of exaggeration. I'll leave that kind of controversy to Oprah. This book introduced me to some aspects of life in Afghanistan, not only for the locals, but for expats and for Americans and Brits working there.

Sunny, the protagonist of the novel, who has come to the country with a boyfriend who spends much of his time away on furtive missions, runs an American-style coffee house. This setting is a perfect backdrop for a variety of employees and patrons whose lives intertwine. They all have back stories: most sympathetic is Yazmina, recently widowed and pregnant, who manages to escape from drug lords to take her as payment for debts her uncle owes.

An older uneducated widow and her son also work for Sunny, and they are at odds over the old and new ways. She hides a secret romance with a tailor she loved before her marriage, a man who has been writing her letters for years, letters she can't read and has to hide from her son, now the man in the family, in control of her life. A female journalist from Britain and a recently divorced wife of a diplomat from Beacon Hill by way of Missouri grow into an unusual friendship and partnership with Sunny as they see egregious injustices toward women.

Throughout the novel, bombs go off, affecting the characters directly or indirectly, and I'm reminded of the lesson I learned when I read Reading Lolita in Teheran: The citizens are victims of politics and religious extremism. Though lighter reading than A Thousand Splendid Suns, this novel touched on similar issues, particularly related to human rights of women and to some of the destruction wrought by the Taliban in the country.

Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad: "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts." As travel becomes at times more dangerous, vicarious travel through the pages of a books--novel or memoir--can perhaps provide the kind of fatalities the world needs right now.

A Cup of Friendship

Dreams of Joy

Every once in a while, I read a book that I enjoy so much that I want to go ahead and blog about it before I finish. This time, I did make myself wait, but just barely. I discovered Lisa See's novels through my book club awhile ago. We always seem to enjoy historical fiction, getting some of our travel in vicariously as well. We started with Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, progressing on through Peony in Love and Shanghai Girls.

I didn't pick up Dreams of Joy right away, and I'm not sure why, except that I just had such a large stack of OTHER books to read. I had obviously missed the information that it is a sequel to Shanghai Girls, this time following daughter Joy, as she gets caught into the idealism of the Maoist Revolution while in college. When she feels responsible for the death of the man she always knew as her father, she takes off for China to find her "real dad" and to take part in what she believes will be the excitement of change.

In the novel, See moves back and forth between that of Joy and her mother Pearl, who returns to China to find her. The story of what happens when idealism runs head on into reality leads to some real horrors. I knew very little about China during this particular period, so the book just whetted my appetite to learn more.

Looking back over the four books, I realize that while what I like about her writing style remains consistent--the details that put me right there, the characters who become so real--no two books are alike. This particular sequel could certainly stand on its own, but read along with Shanghai Girls, the reader gets to know four generations of a family of strong, survivor females.

Since I visited China in 1997 with my friend Debbie and her family when they adopted their daughter Allie, I am particularly interested in that country.

Dreams of Joy

Reading Jackie

Celebrity biographies aren't usually my first choice, but William Kuhn took a different approach to the former first lady Jackie Kennedy Onassis that caught my attention. In Reading Jackie, instead of focusing on the aspects of her life that have been most public, especially her White House years, including the assassination in 1963, he proposes to show a different look at her through her reading life, and especially her surprising midlife career as an editor.

The pictures that emerges is a woman full of contradictions. She experienced a life of privilege, yet often felt she didn't quite belong. As a girl, she loved to curl up with a book, a habit that continued through her life. Kuhn reports that as she approached her death, friends read to her from her favorite books (while her Kennedy sister-in-law perched in the corner, providing unnecessary commentary on visitors.)

When she began her career at Viking, no doubt many suspected she was hired for her connections--certainly useful in the publishing business. Throughout her career, though, she not only showed the work ethic that marked her successes, but she was often described sitting on the floor of her small, nondescript office, working on a layout, or running down the hall in stocking feet, working on a deadline.

Her colleague helped to protect her privacy. She was famously uncomfortable with photographers, for example, and sometimes canceled appearances at book parties when she learned too many would be in attendance. Her move to Doubleday came as a result of a decision to publish a Kennedy-related book despite her opposition.

At other times, though, she was able to overlook elements of books that might have been expected to make her squeamish. In her friend Diana Vrelland's book Allure, Onassis was able to look past sections including Marilyn Monroe and Maria Callas, despite these women's rather public connections to her late husbands.

Kuhn showed how Jackie promoted what she most loved--dancing, eighteenth century European life, collections and relics of royals--French, Russian, and Indian. Her travels often opened up her interests. She also championed causes important to her, adding books to her list related to Civil Rights--particularly opposition to George Wallace--before his political about face.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was also shown as the "closet feminist" she has been called. She was reported to have advised that women avoid marriage and keep their money separate, something she clearly did with the last love of her life, Maurice Tempelsman. In her friendships and in the books she chose to edit, she often seemed acutely aware of women who had made marriages with powerful men who sought to overshadow or even belittle them.

I was surprised by some of the titles on her list, particularly The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell's book in association with the television series with Bill Moyers. As the woman who created the association of Camelot with her husband's administration, she has lived a life of myth. Through the lens of her books, readers will learn that she is a many-layered woman who grew far beyond her most public, tragic role.

Reading Jackie

Light Reading, Heavy Issues

With my summer at its official end and school starting back up, I'm determined not to cut back too much on my pleasure reading. Sure, I'm already reading along with my students the literature assignments--Beowulf, "Story of an Hour," "Rose for Emily," and more--but my own
reading with no agenda, no lecture notes, no test keeps me sane. The last couple of books I've picked up have not been purely literary, but they both dealt with some serious issues.

Anyone familiar with Jodi Picoult knows that her formula is to take some big issue and add several more, then end with an unexpected twist. Sing Me Home takes on in vitro fertilization, gay marriage, alcoholism, and the Christian right. The book certainly gives book clubs plenty of opportunity for discussion, but somehow, the twists and turns didn't ring true, and some of the stereotypes gave me pause.

Joshilyn Jackson is an old Alabama girl. In fact, the first of her books I read was Gods in Alabama. This newest book Backseat Saints was a slow start when I first began reading, but for some reason, I picked it back up and enjoyed it so much more. Even though most of the story takes place in Texas or California, not Alabama, the main character's Dixie tone was pitch perfect. Even though Jackson's novels can deal with serious issues, she manages humor to balance. Roe Grandy (Rose May Lolly) the protagonist is an abused wife warned by a gypsy at the airport "It's him or you" and realizes she should kill her husband. In her first attempt, she shoots the leg off her dog Fat Gretel. No funny, of course, but certainly unexpected. Never having lived with abuse, I find it hard to imagine what causes people to stay in such a threatening situation, denying the truth, always going to the ER after "falling down the stairs." The difficulty of getting away is more evident--and the cost of leaving.

Jackson's literary references in the book caught my attention--books I have read and loved, familiar lines, beloved characters. This young woman's reading life perhaps gave her the imagination to reinvent herself, to become someone else in search of a new life.

I don't even have the heart to look back to see what I planned to read at the beginning of the summer. I never work my way down that list without veering off. I'm glad to know that any I missed are still waiting on my shelf, ready for me to curl up on the couch and escape temporarily into another world.

Light Reading, Heavy Issues

Caleb's Crossing

I've read four of Geraldine Brooks' novels --A Year of Wonder, People of the Book, March, and now Caleb's Crossing--and I can say that she doesn't just rework the same formula. She's taken me all over the world at all times from present times back through history. This book tells the story of a young girl Bethea, the daughter of a minister in the seventeenth century committed to educating and evangelizing the natives in the area. The title, I learned, by the end of the book, refers to many crossings, literal and figurative.

Brooks illustrates the range of attitudes toward religion, ethnic diversity, and especially women's roles in the time period. Caleb--an English name Bethea gives to the Indian boy who calls her "Storm Eyes" is the nephew of a wise man of his tribe and is destined to follow in the same path before converted to Christianity and educated by Bethea's father. The two first meet in the wild and become friends, learning each other's language, despite societal sanctions such a relationship.

The novel takes many tragic turns, not particularly unexpected in this time period--death in childbirth, shipwrecks, drowning, consumption. Bethea ends up serving an indenture at a school adjacent to the new Harvard College in order to pay for the education of her less-than-motivated or capable brother Makepeace. Despite her conditions, she seeks every opportunity to learn--Greek, Latin, Hebrew.

Although much of the attention in the book focuses on breaking down the walls of prejudice between the European settlers and the native Indians, I came away thinking of the effect on girls who are deprived of a full education. Ironically, here in the U. S., where education is readily available, it's easy to take it for granted (or to waste the opportunity). While the jury's still out on Greg Mortenson, he has certainly brought to the world's attention the importance of educating girls, which he says changes not just an individual but a family, a tribe, a community.


Note: I listened to the audio recording of the book, read by actress Jennifer Ehle. I found her enunciation of every article a a little off-putting. Maybe it's just my problem.

Caleb's Crossing

Revisiting Flannery

It's no secret that I'm a Flannery O'Connor fan. I gained my genuine appreciation several years ago when the literature anthology I used for AP English (Bedford Intro to Lit) included four or five of her stories. I'd read one or two before, but when I read--and taught--several together and had the advantage of some accompanying essays by and about her, I became a real fan.

One of my favorite culminating activities was to host a talk show (Think Sally Jesse Raphael or Maury Povich) during which my students came in character. I let them decide on themes related to the recurring ideas we saw in the book. They were easy to locate--Misfits, Bad Kids, Dysfunctional Families. Television producers today would find a gold mine in June Star or Joy/Hulga or Manley Pointer.

Ann Napolitano's new novel A Good Hard Look is set in Milledgeville, Georgia, O'Connor's home town in the sixties, the years leading up to her death from lupus, the disease that also claimed her father at an early age. In this book, though, Flannery and her mother Regina are just two of the characters whose lives intersect, sometimes in the same violent way that her characters' did.

Cookie, a hometown girl, returns from New York to marry Melvin, a wealthy young man she met there and convinced to move to Georgia for her. Lona, the bored wife of a policeman aspiring to be chief, becomes too close to Joe, the high school boy she takes on as an assistant as a favor to her mother, who looks after Lona's daughter Gigi during the day.

While Cookie is working in the local women's clubs to ban Flannery O'Connor's books, which she believes make the town look "just awful," her new husband is giving Flannery driving lessons and building a strong and unusual friendship, a secret he keeps from his wife.

Napolitano has done her homework, including details from O'Connor's life--her trip to Lourdes at her mother's insistence, her writing, and in particular her legendary peacocks, which play a prominent role throughout the story. The author keeps the research light--enough to sate O'Connor fans, to be convincing, without letting someone else's stories take the place of her own. Rather than throw up too many plot details, she instead shows the author's anxiety, her need to get it right, knowing that her writing is all she'll leave behind.

Napolitano's writing is good, her eye for detail, for mind-searing images. She also handles the subject of religion, faith, and grace, important themes in O'Connor's works, with credibility and sensitivity. Readers may find an urge not only to read more by and about Flannery O'Connor, but also to take a look at Napolitano's earlier writing as well.

Revisiting Flannery