A Year by the Sea - Joan Anderson

Sub-title: Thoughts of an unfinished woman

My sister recommended this as one of her favorites.  The writing was lyrical and evocative of the sea and living in a small place solo.  A fiftyish woman escapes to her bungalow on Cape Cod when her husband suggests they move across country for his job.  She reviews her life, decides she's been too giving and then welcomes him back when he decides to retire, although researching after reading the book he eventually got into other things and she had huge success that gave her a whole new career.  They are in their 50s, obviously financially very comfortable.  First world problems.  Thinking they have changed and will hold on to those changes after 50 apparently worked as she runs workshops on "getting finished".  Not a favorite as it is overly romantic and simplistic.

Published: 1999  Read: August 2026  Genre: Memoir 

The Correspondent - Virginia Evans

 This book sets the New Year off to a great start.  I can't remember where I saw it recommended but I checked it out from the library and finished it off in a few evenings.  A wonderful read!

A 70ish woman has been writing letters to friends, acquaintances, neighbors and authors her whole life. We are taken through her later years as she shares her activities with her brother, her son and daughter, her long time friend and others.  The book is written as a series of letters or correspondence between her, the people in her life, and an unidentified person whose letter she's written for years but has yet to send.

Sybil Van Antwerp is stubborn and exacting in her life and her expectations of others. As the story unfolds, we learn she was adopted and when her children gift her a DNA kit it adds an unwelcome complication to her decisions.  Slowly and subtly, we learn more of her life, her loves and losses and witness her evolving into a wiser person who can till learn new lessons and change relationships.

This is a rich, rewarding story of a complex person and her striving to make the best of her life.  Highly recommended.

Quotes

[On her divorce] "When I play it all back I am ashamed and yet I cannot imagine having done any other thing. Grief shared, I think, can produce two outcomes.  Either you bind yourselves together and hold one for dear life, or you let go and up goes a wall too high to be crossed. For us it was the latter."

Published: 2025  Read: January 2026  Genre: Fiction

The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O'Farrell

 In 1560 a 13 year old daughter of the Medici family is promised in marriage to the 24 year old son of another Italian family.  At 15 she is married to Alfonso Ferrara and her purpose is to produce an heir.  His two-faced personality is a shock to the girl and has disastrous effects on her life.

I bought this in LaGuardia airport for a trip home from a conference and finished it on a delayed flight out of Dallas.  O'Farrell's writing is rich without being cloying, intensely evocative without unnecessary words.  I was captivated from the first pages.  Great read for a overly long trip.

Published: 2022  Read: July 2023  Genre: Historical Fiction

Homestead - Melinda Moustkis

 This was different.  A young woman, just 18, visits her sister in Alaska before statehood and meets a man homesteading 150 acres.  After meeting him in a bar, she goes out with him once and with both of them wanting to move on with their own personal plans, he to create a home on land he hopes to own and she to escape her stateside home, agree to get married.  Not an auspicious beginning.

They confront their differences in goals and dreams, through having children, building their home and planting the crops required to meet the homestead requirements.  Through their eyes we see the origins of a new state with all its possibilities and the life of those early inhabitants.  There is a parallel of a growing community of pioneers with the growing understanding in a relationship.

The writing style was awkward many times, like the author was struggling in a new venture just like her characters.  

Published: 2023  Read: July 2023  Genre: Fiction  

Anxious People - Fredrik Backman

I'd watched the movie of this author's first book, A Man Called Ove and remember enjoying it, even with sub-titles.  This second novel was recommended by one of my book clubs.  

I was intrigued, laughing out loud, and crying while reading this book.  A cast of quirky characters embroiled in a hostage situation created by a bumbling bank robber are interviewed by the police that rescue them and the story unravels from their shared experience.  And, it is like unraveling, loose, seemingly unrelated threads come together marvelously.  Backman is a master storyteller.  His characters are real genuine people.  This one is my favorite for 2022.  I imagined it as a play, which would be delicious!

Quotes:

"And that's the weirdest thing about being someone's parent...that you are loved in spite of everything that your are...Perhaps there's a biological reason for that, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and hopelessly for one single reason: you're theirs.  Which is a pretty smart move on biology's part, you have to give it that."

"Do you know how many men like you every single woman on the planet meets every day, who think that every thought that pops into your tiny little male brains is a lovely present you can give us?"

"We weren't allowed to argue just for the sake of winning.  Because sooner or later, that would end  up with one of us winning.  And no marriage can survive that.  Did it work??' Julia asked. 'I don't know," Estelle admitted. 'We never got past the first flush of infatuation."

"[My Dad] He says you end up marrying the one you don't understand.  Then you spend the rest of your life trying."

"...your children aren't your children, they're the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself." [Kahlil Gibran]

Published: 2020  Read: November 2021  Genre: Fiction 

Varina - Charles Frazier

This was a delightful read by the author of Cold Mountain.  The writing is lyrical and the images he creates swim in your head while you follow the story.  Varina was the wife of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.  A complex woman living a life she did not chose.  I was struck by the fact that she died in her 80's in 1906.  It put the impact and immediacy of the Civil War into perspective for me when I think of family alive at that time.

A favorite quote:

[Varina reflecting on a group of sisters defending their home in the South]  "Their yearning she recognized fully from that age, the need to become something at least within the vicinity of your dream of yourself.  She shaped a ragged philosophy to tide them through lonesome nights.  It was simple, and not one she'd ever found the strength to follow.  The idea was, the you you are with others is not you.  To be lonesome is to be who you most fully are."

Published: 2018 Read: February 2020 Genre: Historical 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 Story of a Marriage - Geir Gulliksen

Ugh, whiny, obsessive, weird husband loses wife to another man.  Not recommended.

Published: 2018  Read: October 2019  Genre: Fiction

Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner

I may have read this long ago and was reminded last year of it when one of my book clubs suggested it.  Every page can be savored.  Stegner's descriptions put you in the place and time, experiencing the moment along with the character.  The story of a historian named Lyman Ward, crippled, in a wheelchair, in constant pain, using the letters of his grandmother to tell the story of settlers in the American West. 

Stegner used the real letters of Mary Hallock Foote to weave Lyman's struggle to understand his shattered life with the experience of his grandparents who moved out West to pursue his grandfather's dream of civilizing it.  I loved how the arc of their relationship rose and fell with their disappointments ad struggles, adventures and achievements.  His grandmother, Susan Ward, continues to commit over and over to her marriage, partly as the convention of the times and by choice, giving up the life she knew for the life he promised but never delivered. 

Published: 1971  Read: February 2019   Genre: fiction, classic

The Women's Room - Marilyn French

I have to give this book the #1 rating of my reads this year.

Over the summer while traveling in Alaska, I'd read a later book by this author, In the Name of Friendship and enjoyed it so much I sought out this more famous earlier work.  Millions of copies were sold in the 70's at the height of the feminist movement.  The acclaim is well deserved.

The story revolves around Mira, a conventional 50's wife and mother who finds herself divorced and returns to college.  She collects a group of friends who share their experiences as women and in doing so, illuminate the issues and revelations of the women's movement.  I found it a powerful read and highly recommend it.  I had many pages marked to share quotes.

In the preface, the author notes that "women's work" was and still may be considered illegitimate as subject matter for serious literature and "..the fact that it is trivialized in literature is directly related to the fact that this work is unpaid.  Women comprise a huge slave labor force throughout the world."

At the time the book was written, "Mira understood - what young woman does not?--that to choose a husband is to choose a life".  The story reflected the times, written with a woman's voice and from a woman's perspective.

Quotes

"Loneliness is not a longing for company, it is a longing for kind.  And kind means people who can see you who you are, and that means they have enough intelligence and sensitivity and patience to do that.  It also means they can accept you, because we don't see what we can't accept, we blot it out, we jam it hastily in one stereotypical box or another."

"No matter what life does to you, if you cry, you're crazy."

[I've got more but I want this to be posted for 2018]

More pages with quotes:

p.220 "The problem is that these women think too much about men.  I mean, their men are everything to them.  If the men, think they're attractive, they are: if they don't, they're not.  They give men the power to determine their identities, their values, to accept or reject them.  They have no selves."

p.239 "Loneliness is ll in the way you look at it.  It's like virginity, a state of mind."  "And sometimes when you are alone, aren't you feeling sad mostly because society tells you you're not supposed to be alone?  And you imagine someone being there and understanding every emotion of your heart and mind.  Where if someone was there he - or even she- wouldn't necessarily be doing that at all?  And what's even worse.  When somebody is here and not there at the same time."

p.260 "The point is that if only what endures is real-then only death is real.  All the rest is image, transient, mutable."

p.272 "..the two mainsprings of behavior are sexuality and aggression..or Fear and the desire for pleasure.  Aggressiveness comes out of fear, predominantly, and sexuality out of the other."

p,282 "a space to be and a witness.  It was enough, or if not enough, it was all, all that we could do, in the end, for each other."

p 360 "They accepted the peculiarities of the people they live with."

p 399 "Is it possible to live with somebody whose values you don't share?"

p 404 "Because wounds do leave scars and scar tissue has no feeling.  That's what people forget when they train their sons to be "men" by injuring them.  There is a price for survival."

p 427 [on rape]

p 448 "Love is a golden rain that comes down when it will, and as it spatters in your open palm you exclaim over its brightness, its wonderful moistening of your dry life, its glitter, its warmth.  But that's all.  You can't hold on to it.  It can't fill all of you."

p 458 "Nothing really changes.  She took his hand.  " it does, it does.  It just takes longer than we do."

Published: 1977  Read: 2018  Genre: Fiction, social commentary

Joy Enough - Sarah McColl

This was a book written from grief, a slow unfolding of the relationship between a dying mother and daughter and that daughter and her own soon to be divorced husband.  I got an advanced copy at the Nashville Festival of Books 2018.  It is reflective and dreamlike, struggling to stay afloat while the anchors of her life a set adrift.

Quotes: 

"Our marriage, in the end, had echoed with loneliness.  How many times had we been restaurant silent, the couple that dines wordlessly, then beams up into the server's face at the offer of more water and dessert?  To feel the absence of affection between us where once there had been so much, florid and overflowing - that was lonely.  This was just being alone."

Published:  2018  Read: November 2018  Genre: Memoir

All She Ever Wanted - Rosalind Noonan

I wanted to read this after reviewing the teaser write up on the back because it is a story of a new mother suffering from postpartum depression, something I have first-hand experience with.  The author did a good job of describing the feelings and thoughts of a new mother suffering with this horrible condition, which took up the first two-thirds of the book.  As a consequence of her state, an incident occurs (I won't spoil it) that give dramatic drive to the story.  Worth the read for an understanding of the state of mind of the mother and the way she appears to those around her.

Published:  2013   Read: June 2018  Genre: Fiction

Ellen in Pieces - Caroline Adderson

This tells of the life of a woman through the people in it.  I didn't like it at first; it jumped from one part of her life to the next abruptly, sometimes with years in between; I felt liked I'd missed something, that there were no transitions.  By the end of the story I realized that was the whole point.  Her life is revealed by the stories of her family members and friends, their "pieces" of her puzzle.  I was very satisfied with the writing at the finish.  A good read.

Published:  2014  Read:  June 2018  Genre: Fiction

Shtum - Jem Lester

This is the story told by the father of a severely autistic son.  Jonah is about 9 or 10 years old and does not speak, dress or bathe himself and still wears diapers.  He lives in England where a case must be made to have him placed in a special live-in school for autistic children.  His father, Ben, is guilt ridden over his conflicting feelings over his son.  His mother, Emma, is leaving them to create a single family household that she claims will increase their chances of a placement.  Jonah and Ben go to live with Ben's father.  He is grandfather stoic and gruff with his son, but shares stories of his youth with Jonah as he struggles with his own illness.

These are all hurting people with no end in site for the pain.  The intimate, inside look at life with an autistic child is heartbreaking and horrifying.  The toll on Ben and Emma's marriage, the relationship between fathers and sons are laid out in stark, biting conversations between people trying to figure out how to live with their reality.

The author in real life is the father of an autistic child.  I initially was irritated and put off by the self-pity of the father who drinks himself into stupors.  I finished the book with a deeper empathy for people struggling to live life in impossible situations with no end in sight. 

Published:  2016  Read: December 2017  Genre: Fictionalized biography

Left for Dead - Beck Weathers

Sub-title: My Journey Home from Everest

Finishing up on my 2016 reading posts!  I picked this up at a Christmas book exchange.  It's the first person account of one of the hikers in an ascent on Mt Everest.  He suffered frostbite, was "left for dead" and lost almost both of his hands.  He shares how his obsession with mountain climbing almost ruined his family.  Not particularly good writing but a compelling tale and lessons even for those who don't go off climbing mountains.


Published: 2000 Read: December 2016  Genre: Non-fiction, memoir, Adventure

Bitter is the New Black - Jen Lancaster

Sub-title:  Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered Smartass, Or, Why You Should Never Carry A Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office

Sarcastic, witty, funny, poignant 20 something reels from being laid off in the dot.com bust and gets her priorities straight - maybe.  Enjoyable read.

Published: 2006  Read: September 2016  Genre: Memoir

The Aviator's Wife - Melanie Benjamin

This is an historical fiction account of Ann Morrow Lindberg, the wife of Charles Lindberg who was the first to cross the Atlantic solo.  I didn't enjoy this book at first.  I was frustrated at the passivity of Ann and her acceptance of whatever she was told to do.  Later in the book I realized this set the stage for her futuer growth as a person with her own ideas and desires.  I was familiar with Lindberg's Nazi admiration but was not aware he had fathered other children with three other women in Germany.

It was sad and disturbing to see how celebrity and public life is so destructive and disruptive to the individual and their family.  A good read.


Published: 2013  Read: August 2016  Genre: Historical fiction

Altar Music - Christine Lore Weber

This is the story of several women's lives shaped by their faith and its conventions.  There is a mother who disregards the warnings of her priest and pays the consequence in her marriage.  Her daughter lives in the shadow of her disappointment and her granddaughter takes their resignation with their circumstances as a calling to be a nun.  I found the characters difficult to follow and their limited choices within their Catholic faith frightening.  It was a moving story of the individual's struggle to have a life within the boundaries of their society and the impact of their sacrifices on themselves and those around them.

Published: 2000  Read: August 2016  Genre: Fiction

Forty Rooms - Olga Grushin

I heard about this book on the NYT Review of books podcast.  The story of a woman's life is told as a series of experiences in different rooms in her life, from the nursery where she is a small child to the foyer of her home in old age.  The heroine is not given a first name; we know her only as Mrs. Caldwell.  Her life begins in Russia as a child with a vivid imagination.  She loves words and early in her life composes poetry to capture the world around her and the one she imagines.  But her dreams are thwarted by the expectations of the life of a female - relationships, marriage, children, and a home. Throughout the story she faces choices and her decisions leave her wondering if she should have chosen differently.

I liked the style of the book and the writing was lyrical. Each chapter is titled with the name of a room and a phrase hinting of the content.  There is a dreamy, reflective quality to the writing that is reinforced by the conversations she has throughout her life with her imagined friends and her thoughts.  Some examples:

"For this, I know at last, is why I am here: to experience deeply, my senses a heartbeat away from exploding, then take everything I am feeling - the insignificance of being human, the enormity of being human...and use the best words I have to convey it all...and make it bright, make it personal, make it forever."

"Now, as always, you have a choice.  ...you must remember this: Whenever you come to a fork in the road always choose the harder path, otherwise the path of least resistance will be chosen for you."

For what, after all, is the difference between a memory and a fantasy?  Are not both a succession of imprecisely rendered images further obscured by imprecisely chosen words and animated only by the wistful effort of one's imagination?  And who is to say that a vividly imagined moment of happiness is not, in the end, more enriching to the spirit than a hazy semi-recollection of some pallid pastime?" 

I was left unsettled in the end, wondering if I have made the best choices in my life, if I've chosen the harder path.  I think that's a sign of a good story, it makes me think.


Published:  2016  Read: April 2016  Genre: Fiction

ISBN:9 781101982334

 

Disobedience - Jane Hamilton

I've read "The Book of Ruth" and "Laura Ryder's Masterpiece" and tried to read "A Map of the World" by the same author. This one gave me the same feeling as her previous ones - almost worth reading, but in the end, unsatisfying.

This title is the story of a teenager who reads his mother's email and finds out she is having an affair.  Over the course of about a year, he angst over her infidelity.  Intertwined is the story of his father, a history teacher and his sister, a preteen obsessed with the civil war and its reenactments.  It's a story of family relationships and family tolerances, secrets and weaknesses.

For me, the son's character was inconsistent; at times sounding childish and at others mouthing adult observations for the author's convenience.  I just didn't care much for any of the characters.

Published: 2000  Read: March 2016  Genre: Fiction