Educated - Tara Westover

Quite a powerful ending to the year with this read.  A 30-something woman recounts her upbringing in a fundamentalist Mormon home where the children's births are registered and they don't go to school.  Her father and brother are abusive and her mother and obedient herbalist healer.  Tara goes on to a different mainstream life by obtaining an education, getting a PhD in intellectual history.

Initially I felt skeptical of the story because of the extreme beliefs and actions described and because it was the memories of a child being described by an adult.  Her matter of fact recounts of the injuries endured by her family members and her own perspective years later seem cold and unfeeling, making me wonder if (or when) she will be able to express her own emotions.   She is still estranged from her parents and two of her six siblings and expresses a longing for reconciliation.  This story is not over.

Quote:

p 111. "[after her brother hurts her wrist] This moment would define my memory of that night, and of the many nights like it, for a decade.  In it I saw myself as unbreakable, as tender as stone.  At first I merely believed this, until one day it became the truth...because nothing affected me.  I didn't understand how morbidly right I was.  How I had hollowed myself out.  For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was the effect."

Published: 2018  Read: December 2019  Genre: Memoir

2019 Recap - The Favorites

Well, I'm finally getting around to reviewing 2019 reads and listing the top 5.  Without further ado, those are:

5) Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine - Gail Honeyman (2017)
4) Educated - Tara Westover (2018)
3) Ancestors - William Maxwell (1971)
2) Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner (1971)
1) The Battle for God - Karen Anderson (2000)

 That's a couple of recent one and two older ones and one in the middle, publishing range wise and two auto-biographies, two fictions and one philosophical non-fiction.  You can click on the link to each one to read my review. 

My number one pic, The Battle for God by Karen Anderson is a insightful, thoroughly researched and thought challenging read about the evolution of the three major Judaeo Christian religions and the consequences of sub-groups feeling marginalized and victimized.  Prophetic and enlightening.

Overall, I managed to hit 50 reads this year, a slow summer because I chose travel over reading for enjoyment.  The complete list of 2019 reads is here. What did you enjoy reading in 2019?

Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng

The clash of classes and values swirls into a crisis in this tale of upper-class America and those beneath them.  Mia and her daughter Pearl are vagabonds moving across country constantly until they land in Shaker Heights.  The original planned community, everything is prescribed and orderly for its residents except Izzy, youngest daughter of the Richardsons, who chafes against the expected norms.
When simmering family tensions and teenage relationships reach the boiling point, each character must decide how to continue with their lives.

I liked the setup of this book; a catastrophe introduces us to everyone and then the events which precipitated it are unveiled in the rest of the story.  That said, it also makes me want to skip to the end or speed read to find the link.  Not your typical misunderstanding tragedy, as the differences in the viewpoints and beliefs of the characters are subtly painted.  Yet, I was left disappointed as it seemed as if the free-spirited Mia was a bit too wise, the loyalty of her daughter, Pearl, somewhat unbelievable and the resolution of Izzy and her mother suggestive perhaps of the author's own experience.

Quotes:

p. 122 - "To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once....It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in.  And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again."

p. 248 - "Pearl's caresses had become rare - a peck on the cheek, a one-armed, half-hearted hug - and all the more precious because of that.  It was the way of things, Mia though to herself, but how hard it was...when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart.  It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all." 

Published:  2017   Read: December 2019  Genre: Fiction

Standard Deviation - Katherine Heiny

I enjoyed this humorous, touching and modern view on family relationships.  Graham is on his second marriage to the vibrant, talkative, hyper-social and younger Audra.  They have a son with Asperger's syndrome and his ex-wife, the cool, perfect Elspeth re-enters their life through Audra's efforts at moving forward.  Dealing with their son's challenges and their own quirks of personality makes for a light story that was fun to read.  But what's with the characters' names?

Quotes:

"Bad deeds--even anonymous bad deeds--came home to roost eventually in the form of a speeding ticket or a court summons, but anonymous good deeds generally went unacknowledged forever."

[on starting over] "It would be ...frustrating to start all over again.  It would be like finding your own footprints while lost in the jungle and realizing you had been walking in circles." 

 Published:  2017  Read: December 2019  Genre: Fiction

The Signature of All Things - Elizabeth Gilbert

This was for the most part a delightful read.  Alma is the only daughter of a self-made man of the late 1700's and early1800s.  He serves on a ship to atone for a crime and travels the world, picking up skills that allows him to make his fortune and build a plantation in Pennsylvania that provides medicinal plants, among other ventures.  Alma grows up in this privileged world, exploring their estate and becomes and expert in plants and horticulture, specifically the miniature world of mosses.

Her parents take in a beautiful orphan girl and declare they treat each other as sisters, a relationship that colors the rest of both of their lives.  The family story evolves against the scientific discoveries of the period, in particular Darwin's evolution of the species.  The title of the book refers to the belief that every thing that exists bears the signature of a creator.

Alma finds love, loses it, and strikes out on her own in the world, writing a parallel theory of life to Darwin's, based on her studies of mosses and her life experiences.  The story gets off on a tangent about two thirds of the way but winds up satisfactorily reflecting on the lives of women of the period, family relationships and the natural world.

Quotes:

"Those who are ill-prepared to endure the battle for survival should perhaps never have attempted living in the first place.  The only unforgivable crime is to cut short the experiment of one's own life before its natural end.  To do so is a weakness and a pity--for the experiment of life will cut itself off soon enough, in all our cases, and one may just as well have the courage and the curiosity to stay in the battle until one's eventual and inevitable demise.  Anything less than a fight for endurance is cowardly.  Anything less than a fight for endurance is a refusal of the great covenant of life."

"[reflecting on her theory of life] "For here was the hole in Alma's theory; she could not, for the life of her, understand the evolutionary advantages of altruism and self-sacrifice.  If the natural world was indeed the sphere of amoral and constant struggle for survival that it appeared to be, and if out-competing one's rivals was the key to  dominance, adaptation, and endurance--then what was one supposed to make [of these traits]? 

[discussing her dilemma with a spiritualist] "There is no evolutionary need, you see, for us to have such acute sensitivities of intellect and emotion.  There is no practical need for the minds that we have.  We don't need a mind that can invent religions or argue over our origins.  We don't need ethics, morality, dignity, or sacrifice.  We don't need affection or love, certainly not to the degree that we feel it.  If anything, our sensibilities can be a liability, for they can cause us to suffer distress.  So I do not believe that the process of natural selection gave us these minds--even though I do believe that it did give us these bodies, and most of our abilities.  We have them because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe, which wishes for communion with us...it wants union with us, more than anything."

"I know that just because people can hear each other across the divide does not mean they can necessarily understand each other."

"..I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me." 

Published: 2014  Read: 2019   Genre: Fiction

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine - Gail Honeyman

My sister recommended this book and coincidentally it was chosen for one of my book clubs too.  I devoured it in one day!

Eleanor Oliphant is living a regimented life with a unique outlook shaped by her childhood.  A chance encounter with a co-worker leads to her breaking out of her past and finding friendship and healing.

My first impression of the book was that we all are living our own reality shaped by our unique experiences.  It's so easy to assume everyone else is coming from the same place.  I was drawn into the story to understand Eleanor's experiences and how they led to her behavior.  The story is told with humor that makes the reality bearable and demonstrates the strength of the human spirit.  A great read!

Quotes

p. 91 - [She observes Raymond's mother looking at her son] She looked at him with so much love that I had to turn away.  At least I know what love looks like, I told myself.  That's something.  No one had ever looked at me like that, but I'd be able to recognize it if they ever did."

p. 165 - [After Raymond touched her shoulder] A human hand was exactly the right weight, exactly the right temperature for touching another person, I realized.

p. 227 - These days, loneliness is the new cancer - a shameful, embarrassing thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people don't want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them. 

p. 299 [From her counselor about her childhood experiences] ...there were terrible, terrible consequences for everyone involved. And none of that is your fault, Eleanor, absolutely none of it.  "I don't know if you need to forgive your mother, Eleanor," she said,.  "But I'm certain of one thing: you need to forgive yourself". 

Published:  2017   Read: December 2019  Genre: Fiction

I Remember Nothing - Nora Ephron

Subtitle: and other reflections

I enjoyed one of the author's other books, I Feel Bad About My Neck, and her smart, snappy writing here is as good as that in her screenplays for When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle among others.  This book is in the same spirit, though a bit more unfocused.  I laughed out loud when she explained her addiction to mobile Scrabble games.  Her life took her to all parts of the world and encounters with countless interesting people.  I enjoyed her sharing a part of it.  Sadly, she passed away shortly after the publication of this book.

Published: 2010   Read: December 2019  Genre: Memoir

Shadow Play - Cynthia Harrod Eagles

I don't know that I've read one of CHE's mystery novels before, at least not one from the Bill Slider series, the police detective hero in this 20th book of the series.  I enjoy her writing style and know from my long experience with her Morland Dynasty series that she is thorough in her research of time and place.  That said, I'm not a fan of mysteries, so I don't think I'll be seeking the earlier ones in this series. 

This is the mystery of a body found in a junkyard and the police investigation to discover the murderers.  I realized as I read that I was getting a very English version of police work and of different groups in English law enforcement; minorities, women, working class and elites.  Those learnings made the read worthwhile. 

Published: 2018  Read: December 2019  Genre: Mystery

Black Hawk Speaks - John G Neihardt

I got this from the library after reading a reference to it in Future Home of the Living God.  It tells of the Lakota Indian traditions and culture as documented by Neihardt in interviews with Black Elk, an Ogala Lakota medicine. man.  Black Elk's son translated for Neihardt so there are layers of interpretation.  The book became a cult hit in the 70's.  I admit I couldn't finish the translated stories though I did read most of the historical evolution and looked at the pictures. 

Published:  1932 (originally) 1988 ed.   Read: December 2019  Genre: Non-fiction (Native American)

The Lost Family - Jenna Blum

This was a quick read.  A man who loses his wife and twin daughters during the Holocaust moves to American where he becomes a chef, remarries and has another child.  Their marriage and family is overshadowed by his past.  The story didn't go anywhere yet it was pleasant reading. Okay for the beach, even if it is the middle of winter.

Published: 2018  Read: December 2019  Genre: Fiction