Your Words, Your Story

My first book, Your Words, Your Story, is a creative memoir disguised as writer’s guide. This is my book’s new blog. A whole new page and a new way (for me at least) of blogging is about to begin. I envision this page as an open forum where members can discuss my book, or their books-in-progress, ask questions about the writing and publishing processes, exchange information, offer insights, and post their own stories. Stay tuned as I work out how this will happen.

(This is CindyCode for ask Mike to make my ideas real when he gets some free time.)

Meanwhile, I hope you will read (and enjoy, and learn from) my book! You can order it here.

Scaling way back on the reviewing was the right thing to do. I’m to the point of not wanting to even keep lists of books. Not sure yet what I will do with this page on the site. I’d like to organize it somehow, maybe with names and links to the reviews. Or maybe I’ll just have Mike whisk it off.

Have firmly decided not to review here anymore. For at least a while. I will still keep a list of what I’m reading because I am anal w/a bad memory. I talk about some of these books elsewhere on the blog. Look for more of that in the future. And also a possbily Stephen King inspired TOP TEN books of the year in 2008. I love him from afar, but none of his picks this year were books I had even read. Okay, I read one. The only one written by a girl of the female persuasion. But I forgive him, asfter last year he gave me This Book Will Save Your LIfe. Well, not literally gave it to me, but encouraged me to go buy it for $372 or whatever hardcovers cost these days..

So here’s what I’ve been reading since the Christmas glutlunous orgy:

This Boy’s Life (Tobias Wolff) M

Lord Jim (Kingsley Amis) N

Remembering the Future (Colette Baron-Reid) SSH

The Many LIfes of Tom Waits (Patrick Humphries) BIO

Happiness is an Inside Job (Sylvia Boorstein) SSH

Losing the Moon (Patti Callahan Henry) N

Where the River Runs (Patti Callahan Henry) N

Between the Tides (Patti Callahand Henry) N

The Sound of Lanuage (Amulya Malladi) N

The Story Behind the Story (ed. Peter Turchi & Andread Barrett) SS&SA

What’s the Difference? (Marc Tyler Nobleman) NF

My friend Shirley has a list on her website of what she’s reading. I have been dithering about reviews here…I love to read and love recommending books I enjoy but am getting a little stale on the idea of reviewing here. I’ve been thinking about closing down this page or just leaving the archives up or something. I still review for Publishers Weekly, and for now, that seems to be enough spouting of opinion for me regarding my reading mattter.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m busy, burnt out, or need a break. But in the spirit of the season, I’m going to do a Shirley-like list of mostly Christmas themed-books and just tell you what I’ve read in the last week or two without any editorial comment.

Ice Storm Anne Stuart

The Christmas Pearl Dorothea Benton Frank

A Christmas Beginning Anne Perry

An Affair Before Christmas Eloisa James

Holidays on Ice David Sedaris

The Christmas Promise Donna VanLiere

What I liked about Lisa See’s historical novel set in China was the sense of female friendship that ran so strong through the culture. A friendship between two women from different social classes is the frame of this book, with the fascinating backdrop of long-ago Chinese tradition. The powerlessness–of the women and the peasants–is appalling.

I loved the voice of the main character. Lily, and getting the low down on the then “secret” woman’s language and that writing was a main mode of communication over the years. I loved the loyalty Lily and her best friend showed each other, but also that the human side that came out with misunderstandings. Fascinating too, is to see the rigid class system and how only one thing allowed women to move out of their birth position on the tier of weath, power, and success–the shape of their feet.

Footbinding made the feet of women appear as lotus petals, the highest sign of beauty and blessed karma in China 200 years ago. The “best” feet were only 3 inches long!!! Bones broken, feet set into impossible shapes not meant for walking–blood and pain–not for the faint-hearted reader. I’ve avoided Lisa See’s novels in the past just for this reason, but I adore her mother’s work, so when my book group suggested this one, I was game. And See is a talented storyteller. Bet I know where she gets it from.

Shirley MacLaine has made a life-long study of esoteric subjects like reincarnation, ESP, and UFOs. She’s talked to everyone from CIA agents to Stephen Hawkings to shamans. And in this book, she discusses the topics again. There’s not a lot about getting older in here. A bit here and there. Mostly the book is about the people she’s met and the evidence she’s acquired regarding E.T.s.

I was amazed.

I’ve read MacLaine’s books before, and always thought she had an easy-to-follow style. She’s an entertainer, and that spark carried over into her writing. It was entertaining. This book is different. She knows it and she prepares the reader for the density of material. Still, I found it heavy going at times. Less focused than previous books. She’ll be talking about reincarnation and then suddenly switch to UFOs. Like that.

I’d say the book is most about UFOs. MacLaine believes in them, believes E.T.s walk among us, believes there was life on Mars. Possibly. That had to do with the pyramids. There are structures exactly of the same dimensions on Mars. I think I’m getting that right. All kinds of interesting info like this. And tons of U.S. government personnel speak up about the cover ups in Roswell and elsewhere. According to MacLaine, Eisenhower even signed a treaty with E.T.s, which the space folks simply ignored.

Did I say I was amazed? My mouth metaphorically fell open more than once. I’m not saying I believe or I don’t believe the stuff she’s written. I like to keep an open mind. What I am saying is that the information was fascinating despite the sometimes turgid prose.

Although I’m closer to Buddhist than Christian in my personal spiritual practices, I love Episcopalian priest Father Tim Kavanagh. After nine Mitford novels, Jan Karon takes Tim, now retired, back home to Holly Springs, Mississippi, where he was born. Tim left Holly Springs more than thirty years ago, but a mystery letter sends him back on a quest for answers to questions he has long avoided answering.

Tim’s wife, Cynthia, is home in MItford with a broken foot, and Dooley, their son, is also close to home, studying to become a veterinarian. So Tim takes off in the vintage Mustang Cynthia bought him with only his dog Barnabas for company. Never before has Karon explored Tim’s past, and she does a wonderful job flipping back and forth between Tim’s childhood and young adult years and the present. It’s a lovely book. There’s something so restful and comforting about Karon’s gorgeous voice, delicious characters, and Tim’s not-so-simple faith.

And by the final section of the book, Cynthia and Dooley arrive in Memphis to meet up with Tim for a turn in his life neither he nor the reader will see coming. Karon does a super job of mixing folksy wisdom and down-home truths with humor. Elvis stories, groundhog recipes, and small town life in general get careful, loving treatment. I can’t wait to see what Karon does next. Home to Holly Springs is a treasure of a feel-good book.

Just finished the terrific One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson, the witty follow up to Case Histories. What a pleasure. Especially after a depressing previous read, never to be blogged about by name, and then this falling apart business.

Okay enough cryptic commentary. What’s Jackson been up to? Even more mischief than last time, that’s what. He’s in Scotland for an arts festival with his actress girlfriend and naturally gets embroiled immediately in a murder-for-hire scheme involving Russian prostitutes, a crime writer with a secret, a lady cop with a shoplifting son, and other assorted nuts.

Atkinson sticks to her structural trick of keeping the players mostly in their own little worlds until the end when she brings it all smashingly together and then throws in a final twist or two for good measure. And her writing is just lovely. She’s funny and her plot’s full of good fun while at the same time smart in its perceptions of the human heart.

Way to make me forget my woes, Kate.

I think the reason I never read this book before, even though I went through a major Kurt Vonnegut phase in my 20s, is because of the title. I knew it was about WW2. War creeps me so totally out I didn’t want to have think about it. Did I know it was an ANTI-WAR novel? Maybe not. But even anti-war novels are about war.

I’m actually teaching this novel, my choice, this term. I thought students might like Vonnegut’s writing the way I did when I was their age. (I still like his writing.) Slaughterhouse Five is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a WW2 soldier captured by the Germans and taken to Dresden as a POW. Billy is there, as is Vonnegut, himself a character in the novel, when Dresden is fire-bombed by American and British air forces.

Having Vonnegut as a character in his own novel is a nifty piece of metafiction and helped make his literary reputation. The technique still holds up now, nearly forty years later. I’m in the process of re-reading (again!) Feast of Love for my book group, and Charles Baxter’s a character in his novel, functioning mainly as a narrator for other people’s stories, just like Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five. So there was Vonnegut, breaking new ground way back when, and we’re still working that soil.

In the mix of the war story, and the terrible bombling of Dresden, Vonnegut has Billy travel time, back and forth, never knowing where he’ll be. He gets abducted by aliens and sometimes in his travels ends up on Tralfamadoria, a planet where he is kept naked in a cage and viewed like a zoo animal by small people with eyes in their hands. There’s more, naturally. Vonnegut’s humanism and humor comes out on every page and as his philosophy of life and sense of humor are both very close to my own, I just loved it. Admired the art of it, adored the heart.

Hope my students do, too. Hard to say in the politically conservative climate we live in now. Still, at least I’ve got the academic freedom to choose a book like this and to spend a few weeks discussing the ideas Vonnegut so entertainingly presents.

Right now, I’m reading Intuition by Allegra Goodman, and it’s wonderful. Research science somehow reminds me of writing. The endless reworking of ideas that may never ever pan out. Her characters are a hoot and the writing is crisp, clean, sharp as an October wind. I’m not too far into it yet, so I’ll leave it at this: some obsessive type in a second rate lab (to these competitive folks, any lab not located in Harvard is second rate) has possibly discovered a cure for cancer. Maybe.

Last night at book group, we discussed the marvelous Saving Fish From Drowning and yay everyone loved it. With the situation in Burma right now, the novel is more timely than ever. Plus I love when my selections go over well.

Such was not the case with Their Eyes Were Watching God, which I loved rereading after 20+ years, although my students didn’t agree. Zora Neale Hurston is not their cup of tea. They loved The Great Gatsby and put up with the dialect in Eugene O’Neill’s play Anna Christie, but Their Eyes put them over the edge.

Next up in the classroom is Slaughterhouse Five and as I have not read it before, I can only hope there’s no dialect. From what I remember of my Vonnegut phase, he has that absurdist humor that, if you have no sense of either, can fall flat. But it’s about war so the male half of the class at least will be pleased to stop with what may seem to them endless discussion of gender issues.

Books I really want to read: Eric Clapton’s bio and Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs.