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

Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Shiguro

 

A good friend recommended this book as a thinking piece.  I was enthralled from the first paragraph.  

An AF (Artificial Friend) named Klara waits in the front display window of the store where parents in the future come to buy their children a companion. Klara joins Jessie's family, a frail girl who lives with her working mother and a housekeeper, her parents having divorced after the death of her sister.  Klara's role is to observe Jessie and anticipate her needs.  In doing so, Klara learns how humans love one another - or don't.  Klara tells the story in her naive, curious voice, and I was challenged to figure out some odd names she gave to objects she saw being used by the family.  The story evolves as Jessie grows weaker and older.  Klara observes without judgment, accepting the changes in their lives, having served her purpose.  

I thought the end was unsatisfying, much like life can be unresolved and yet continues.  An interesting read that I'll be pondering for awhile.

Quotes:

"We're both of us sentimental.  We can't help it.  Our generation still carries the old feelings.  A part of us refuses to let go.  The part that wants to keep believing there's something unreachable inside each of us.  Something that's unique and won't transfer."

"...science has now proved beyond doubt there's nothing so unique...That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise.  A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn't know better."

Published: 2021  Read: June 2023  Genre: Fiction

A Broken Tree - Stephen F Anderson

 Sub-title: How DNA exposed a family's secrets

This is the story of the type of unexpected results that can be found with DNA testing.  The author, a long-time employee of FamilySearch, the genealogy powerhouse, suspected that he and his siblings were not all of the same parents, and DNA testing proved his suspicions.  I was struck by his seeming lack of knowledge of DNA testing for someone who worked in the genealogy industry.  He began testing of YDNA and proceeded cautiously as the years went on, being mindful of the feelings of his parents and siblings.  A mindful example of the issues that arise with DNA testing.

Published: 2019   Read: June 2022  Genre: Memoir

In Five Years - Rebecca Serle

A young, successful, woman lawyer (Dannie), engaged to the perfect, considerate man (David) experiences her future one evening - and she's with a different man, in a different place.  She's shaken to her core and we she meets that future man (Aaron) she's convinced she can alter the future.  This was a clever take on predestination and what we think we can control in our lives.  I finished it up in a  couple days. Her relationship with her best friend since childhood (Bella) plays counterpoint to her structured, managed life.

Clever, quick read.

Quote:

"You mistake love.  You think it has to have a future in order to matter, but it doesn't.  It's the only thing that does not need to become at all.  It matters only insofar as it exists.  Here. Now. Love doesn't require a future."

Published:  2020 Read: March 2022  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 

The Boy, the mole, the fox and the Horse - Charles Mackesy

 I needed some thoughtful reflection and my sister recommended this book.  It's a gentle story of friendship and life, told through pen and ink drawings and the comments of the four characters written in cursive.  Every line could be pondered.  Good for the soul.

Published: 2019  Read: May 2021 Genre: Philosophy

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

Night of Miracles - Elizabeth Berg

This was a sweet story that builds upon her previous book's characters.  I don't think I read the prequel.  This is the story of an aging widow, her neighbors and adopted daughter and granddaughter.  It's about kindness and caring and the passing of one generation who hands off the future to the next.  A nice read.

Published: 2018  Read: October 2019  Genre: Fiction

Ref: Black Elk Speaks - a book about being part of nature was referred to as one of the favorites of one of the characters in the story.  I added it to my TBR.

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

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

The Perfect Girlfriend - Karen Hamilton

Juliette is obsessed with her former boyfriend Nate, convinced he will return and if not, determined to convince him. A creepy but compelling read of someone who can't let go and move on. 

Published:  2019  Read: November 2018  Genre: Fiction

Upstate - James Wood

Picked this up in the library on the New listings shelf.  A quiet, thoughtful story of a father and his daughters dealing with the fall out of his long ago divorce from their now deceased mother.

Quotes:

[comment on nursing home] "It was all pretty good, or as good as it can be when one's whole life has been reduced to souvenirs of selfhood."

"Wel, religious is just someone else's definition of what is sacred"

"You're only as good as your suppliers, all the way down the chain.  Sort out who supplies you, find the people you can really trust, and that's half of the work done there." 

 

Published: 2018  Read: November 2018   Genre: fiction

Joe Jones - Anne Lamott

This book was written a long time ago, maybe at the beginning of the author's career.  It was a joy to read.  Anne Lamott paints her characters which such great detail and pays close attention to how people interact with each other.  Her story here is simple; an unfaithful man is trying to get the courage to come back to the people he betrayed.  Their lives were affected by his presence and his absence.  I found the story touching and very real.  A good read from a great author.

Published:  1985  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

Far From The Tree - Andrew Solomon

Sub-title: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

This book occupied most of my June reading, coming in at 702 pages plus 200 pages of notes and bibliography.  I checked it out of the library after listening to a review on the New York Times Book Review podcast.

The author explores the relationship between parents and their exceptional children in terms of how they identify themselves.  He uses the term "horizontal identity" to describe individuals belonging to a group separate from the traditional family relationship.  He illustrates these horizontal identities by interviewing the parents and children in multiple different groups: deaf, dwarf, down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, disability, prodigies, rape, crime, transgender as well as his own identities as a son and father.  It's a tremendous challenge for parents and their children dealing with these issues.  In all these horizontal identities there is the need to relate to others in the same group and often a struggle between that identity and the traditional family.

What struck me most was how parents embraced and accepted the identity of their children.  There are the usual steps of "grief" experienced; shock, denial, anger, depression, acceptance and with that acceptance comes an embrace of the special uniqueness of their child.  In many instances, parents become activists and advocate for the needs of their children.

Don't all parents do this?  Don't we all sacrifice for our children?  And is that sacrifice ingrained or chosen?  The remarkable way that families dealing with the challenge of each of these groups cope, embrace and yes, even celebrate the differences, is inspiring and encourages reflection.  Their children grow up to see their illness or difference as a definition of who they are and embrace that identity.

It is a long and challenging read because the writing style is rambling.  At least a quarter of the book could be left out and  the readability improved by adding structure and conclusions to each chapter. Food for thought, but an overly rich serving.

Published:  2012  Read: June 2017  Genre: Sociology

Nutshell - Ian McEwan

I liked this one for its quirky twist on the point of view - I won't give it away, let's just say I've never read anything from this kind of character.  It's a story about a murder plot and the speaker is trying to prevent it, mostly out of self-interest.  A quick read that's worth your time.

Published:  2016  Read: March 2017  Genre: fiction, mystery

The Nest - Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

This was a first novel by a young author.  It tells the story of spoiled siblings who have waited all their lives for the inheritance of their parents, the "nest" of the title.  At first, they are unappealing characters, self-absorbed and petty.  And yet, as they realize the inheritance is unlikely due to the actions of their surviving mother and their feckless older brother, they grow to meet the reality of caring for their own future.  Funny and ironic, a good read.


Published:  2016  Read: February 2016  Genre: Fiction

The Reading Promise - Alice Ozma

Sub-title: My Father and the Books We Shared

A young girl and her father make a promise to read together every day...and continue their "reading streak" for over 3,000 days until she went away to college.  It sounds like a great story but I couldn't be completely enthusiastic as their relationship as described bordered on creepy.  Her mother and father separate about the same time as the streak begins yet her mother continues to spend Christmas Eve on their couch every year.  She has an older sister, about seven years older, who is mentioned occasionally but it is clear that Alice is the focus of her father's attention.  The relationship aside, the streak is a noble goal and while it broadened her knowledge it didn't greatly enhance her writing skills.

Published: 2011  Read: January 2017  Genre: Memoir

The Stranger in My Genes - Bill Griffeth

I've been obsessed with genealogy since retirement and this book is a perfect appetizer for that hunger.  The author is a CNBC financial news analyst who discovers via a DNA test that the father he was raised with is not his biological father. His story is a poignant revelation of the feelings, thoughts, relationships and changes experienced when these types of secrets are revealed.  He has to decide whether to confront his elderly mother; he has to re-think the family tree branch that he can no longer claim.  A great read for something that more and more people will be confronting as DNA testing continues to grow.

Published:  2016  Read: January 2017  Genre: Memoir