Well, it seems I took the summer off from my blog. I didn't mean to, it just somehow happened. So I'll give you a quick update on what I've been reading this summer. I'd love to hear what you've been reading too!
At the very beginning of the summer, the Fab 5 Book Club met to talk about Olive Kitteridge by Elisabeth Strout. That book is full of sadness and horrible events, stars a crabby, rather unlikeable protagonist, and is so wonderfully developed that you can't help but keep reading and even liking it! Olive is a main character like no other, her life told in bits and pieces by a string of characters from her hometown in Maine, and Strout is such a great writer that you can empathize with this person you would not necessarily want to know in real life.
We also took in I Am Number Four, a young adult sci-fi/fantasy novel about aliens come to earth by a conglomeration of writers under the pseudonym Pittacus Lore. It's a fast-paced, fun read that grabs you from the beginning and also falls prey to a number of moments that seem engineered to grab the attention of a teen reader. Good looking alien male lead? Check. Gorgeous, perfect girlfriend? Check. A book-long chase sequence? Check. New kid not fitting in with a school bully? You guessed it, Check. The language was needlessly rough. Yet there is something catchy, charming about it. The movie didn't live up to the book. Now the sequel is out, and I've heard it's better than the first. And the original was good enough that 2 of the 4 of us had trouble sleeping because they were kind of freaked out.
The Neland Ave Church Women's Book Club contemplated Coop by Michael Perry. I love Michael Perry, which you may know from earlier posts. I read his book Population: 485 a year or two ago, and then I heard him speak (twice) at Calvin College at the last Festival of Faith and Writing. A down home intellectual, he effortlessly moves from farm life to mechanics to fatherhood to the writing life to philosophy to art to small-town Wisconsin to cooking and on and on. Lovely. So, back to the Neland Book Club and Coop. In Coop, the recently-married 40ish Perry is newly living on his mother-in-law's former farm, attempting with his wife to begin a more self-sustaining life. Raising chickens, in particular, is a major goal. They garden and get pigs and get chickens and rear 2 daughters. In the meantime he also considers the way that he was raised--his parents' endless love, religious beliefs and faithful patience for a string of foster children and adoptive children. It's lovely and gritty and real and touching.
And then just recently the Fab 5 got together to discuss Truck: A Love Story, also by Michael Perry. (If you are sensing a common thread here, namely me, you may just be on to something). Truck backs up a bit to the year that Perry meets the wife he so tenderly describes in Coop. He is intent on restoring the 50s-era International pickup truck he's had for 20 years, which can only actually happen due to the talent of his brother-in-law Mark. Again, Perry is hilarious and earthy and gentle. Did I mention how much I love his work?
Enough. Also on the summer's checklist was the book Soul Searching, by Christian Smith and Melina Lundquist Denton. I was really under the gun with this one. I volunteered to lead the discussion for the Neland women, and with a 3 week camping trip I thought I'd have plenty of time to dig into it. The camping trip was great, but about a week in we had the misfortune of noticing that our youngest child was scratching her head in earnest at the Grand Canyon. Turned out she had head lice. I spent the rest of my free should-have-been-reading time picking through her hair, which satisfied neither of us but rectified the situation. And so I had to speed-read the book when I got home, something I am not very good at doing.
Actually, this is a really interesting book, a sociological study of the spiritual lives of teens in the early 2000s. I have to admit that due to time restraints I had to skip the chapter directed specifically to parents and youth workers in the Catholic Church. But the overall gist of the book is that young people are interested in spiritual things, are willing to go along with what their parents believe, and for the most part have adopted a "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism". In other words, their religion serves them as a tool to make them feel better, happier, rather than asking them to serve a God who loves them sacrificially and asks the same of them. This has major implications for churches that want to train up a child in the way that he/she should go. If you don't want to take the time to read the whole book, you could get a good bit of it from the Conclusion section. I'm not much of a sociologist, but I'm interested to read through the follow-up book now.
As we toured the Southwest United States, my husband showed me up--he actually finished a book, and it was even relevant to the places we were visiting. He read How the West Was Won by Louis L'amour. His review: "It was okay, but nothing special." Son Andrew read a book called Colorado Ghost Stories, which he truly loved.
I'm about 2/3rds of the way through a sort of modern Gothic novel called The Distant Hours by Kate Morton. It's about a woman who is trying to figure out the connection between her mother and the family who lives in an old estate, the same family and estate her mother joined as a child during World War II when the children of London were evacuated to the country. I keep picking it up, then having to put it down to read something else. Someday I may even finish it. I like it.
A very different read this summer was the book On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner. I read this in preparation for a fiction workshop that I attended in June. If I had read this book before signing up for the fiction class, I probably would've ended my fiction career right then. Gardner's book is full of good information on the reason for writing, characterization and other practical things, but his description of who the novelist is left me shaking in my boots, sure that there's no chance I could fit into that category! Then I spent a wonderful week having the novelist Bret Lott lead my class through our manuscripts and about 5 million useful tips for writing. We'll see if I ever have the guts to return to my manuscript.
So it's been a great summer, and now back to real life. Maybe I'll be more faithful to my blog again. We'll see.
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