Top Books of 2011

I never was afraid to talk about books. Well, okay, maybe once. When I was thirteen and there was a boy involved. A teacher, perhaps for a Homeroom assignment, had tasked the class with composing daily schedules, and for one short week of my life, I operated like clockwork. It was amazing. I came home, I ate a snack, I mushed through homework: Math, Science, English, History. The end goal was the library book waiting on the side table, and each day was a success. All my work done and hours till bedtime, I curled up on the sofa to plunge back into the book. It was a revelation: organizing my hours, making efficiency work for pleasure! More time to read!

But it was the seventh grade, and I had the misfortune to swing my three-ring binder open just as one of the class hooligans passed by on the cool, snooty way to his desk. “Is that your schedule? You don’t really do that, do you?” No, of course I didn’t. Or wouldn’t, ever again. The bubble was burst as quickly as it was constructed.

My path to organizational greatness may have died that day. Fortunately, my obsession with good stories did not.

I had a baby a few short weeks (and long nights) before the clock ticked its way into the new year of 2011. Did that stop me from reading incessantly? Of course not. What I find in hindsight is that my 2011 reading arranges itself pretty neatly into two categories: imaginative fantasy fiction and landscape prose (largely nonfiction). This comes as no surprise. 2011 saw me deeply engaged in writing my fantasy novel, and also largely focused on writing nonfiction essays. The correlation between reading and writing is no accident.

Here are the books that grew my imagination most while Ella grew through her first year:

Landscape Prose and other Nonfiction

~ Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, for stunning, lyrical prose and deep human sympathy; the only full-on fiction in this category. (I also recommend: Home.)

~ Blue Highways by William Least-Heat Moon, for well-paced, well-told travel tales.

~ "The Long-Legged House," an essay by Wendell Berry, for a strong sense of place, belonging, and purpose. And a view to the small town farming life. (I also recommend: Best Person Rural by Noel Perrin.)

~ All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot, for skillfully weave fact into fiction. It's about country veterinary work, for goodness sake, and I enjoyed it! A storytelling feat.

~ Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin, December's requisite biography. As always, Tomalin gives a balanced account with plenty of well-considered detail. (If you're looking for Dickens's fiction instead, I recommend: Bleak House, and, of course, A Christmas Carol.)

(Mostly) Fantastical Fiction

~ The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, six books by Dianna Wynne Jones, for their sheer imagination and well-wrought resolutions. (Start with: The Nine Lives of Christopher Chant and Conrad’s Fate. Then the other four Chronicles. Then Howl's Moving Castle and House of Many Ways. If children's fantasy is at all up your alley, you won't regret it. And you'll catch more than a glimpse of Harry Potter's literary ancestry.)

~ Divergent by Veronica Roth, for excellent pacing and a new author who promises creative, if particularly dark, contribution to the Young Adult dystopia genre.

~ State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, for lyrical prose, surprising turns of event, and thought-provoking scenarios, as always. (I also strongly recommend: Bel Canto.)

Honorable Mentions

~ The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan (What is sometimes-shabby in delivery is nearly made up for in wild imagination.)

~ Redwall by Brian Jacques (C.S. Lewis distinguishes between fantasy involving talking beasts - think Narnia - and realism using animals who could just as easily be people - think Animal Farm. This story is the latter, but I still enjoyed the discovery.)

~ Matched by Ally Condie (Do we really need another dystopian story with a female protagonist? I won't complain.)

Last year - 2011 - was an anomaly as years go. I won’t ever get one like it, especially not the early months when it was just me recuperating and a quiet baby sleeping her days away. There wasn’t any schedule needed, because there wasn’t anything to do except hold the small, sweet, sleeping thing - and read. I’ll never pick up Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping again without smelling that sweet-sour breath against my face. The discovery of Dianna Wynne Jones’s Chrestomanci series and Brian Jacques’s Redwall tumbles through memory with the distinct feel of a small feather-weight snuffling and snoozing in my arms. Sweet winter days. It’s uncertain whether I was changed more by the stories I read or by the sleeper I held. They’re too twined up together; I’ll never know. I don’t need to.

Top Books 2010 are here.

Top Books 2009 are here.

There Is a House

There is a book, The Napping House. I knew nothing of it, but my mother-in-law recognized it instantly on Skype: a beloved classic. I confess I only chose it at the library because its big board pages were large enough to lay open on the floor as Ella flipped through. The pictures did nothing for me on first glance, and I didn't even read the story. Happy accident.

A week later, I could recite it to you blindfold. It is one of those woman-who-ate-a-fly tales, though here, the culprit is a flea that bites. "A wakeful flea, who bites the cat, who scares the dog, who wakes the child . . . " Before that, the pages add up: first a sleeping grandma on a cozy bed. (Why that didn't hook me first thing, I cannot say.) Then a sleeping child on a snoring grandma. Then a snoozing dog on a sleeping child on a snoring grandma . . . You get the picture. Once the flea bites, though, they all unstack one by one. The scared mouse! The clawed cat! The flailing child! Each gets his own startled page.

I had read the book through to Ella several times already when we flipped to the part with the cat in the air, eyes bulging, paws extended, fur electrified. All of a sudden, Ella put up her arms and shrieked! Now it's her new thing. She waits patiently as the characters stack themselves in sleep, and then the flea bites - and the arms go up and the shrieking ensues. We have moved into the realm of parroting, and we don't just copy Mom and Dad in this house. No, no. There is a house (a napping house!) where children copy books. I'm so happy to live in it.

Ella's asleep now, and I am, as usual this time of year, cozied up with my (dying) laptop under the guest bed covers. The floorboard heater vibrates and clicks. The desktop on the chillier end of the room makes intermittent scritchy noises as it, too, falls asleep. But here and now I'll wake up to my own happy imagination, with the helps of books, yes, and chai tea. I love this part of the day. I'd lift up my hands and shriek, but I don't want to wake the baby.

In the book, the images start dim and blue-grey, and then they lighten, first imperceptibly, then yellower and bolder as each character is roused. by the final, wakeful pages - child, dog, cat, grandmother flying happily through the air - the light streaming through the bedroom window is sunny as can be. Today, on this second in a string of rainy, disappointingly warmish winter days, Ella flipped to those end pages, and right at that moment - I swear - the sun shone through our attic room windows. She shrieked, the room lightened. Quite the moment.

Now, writing under a duvet, a bedspread, a blanket, and sheets, the sky outside is grey again, the wind buffets, and the temperature drops. It's one of those days with a downward arrow on the weather channel icon. I can't complain. I won't. The sunny morning was for Ella. This chilly grey hour is for me, and for words, and for looking into books with my own quiet, melancholy kind of happiness. I do a delighted little shriek inside.

(And, of course, I recommend The Napping House, by Audrey Wood. Even if you don't have children, there's sheer joy bouncing around the room on the second to last page that can't be beat.)

Open Communications

(a Winter Theme post: Comfort)

I sit in the driver's seat and shuffle the thin stack of papers while Ella complains at her too-tight straps in the back. She's growing out of her carseat already. I'm only now readying myself to read about the days when she was too small to fit in it, bolstered by pads and blankets in her loose newborn clothes. I make it through two and a half pages and then hastily lay them on the passenger's side for later, or never. I throw the car in reverse. We'll go somewhere else, instead. Anywhere but the hospital parking lot.

It's a common assumption against the current medical climate that doctors these days push for C-sections. "They want you out of there as fast as possible," the rhetoric goes. But I contend that wasn't my case. As informed as one can be when waves of outrageous pain are crashing down, it was a good decision. That is one of the very few things I know about Ella's awful delivery. We hastily signed the papers and went for it. But from there on, I am adrift in uncertainties. There were complications that got resolved in further procedures, there was more pain, and there was an awful lot of aloneness in silent rooms for a day that would otherwise have been a time for togetherness. And then we just kept going, forward-looking, carried along in the current of caring for a baby night and day. That was the good part.

Less good were the equivocal doctors with sardonic responses and evasive answers. Questions and frustrations mounted one upon the other. But the weather warmed and my body healed accordingly, and our very own wee small being came into a personality of her own. There were better, higher, lovelier things to think about, and so the events surrounding her birth got hung in a back closet alongside the frustration, not least at God, and the winter clothes that wouldn't come out again till the end of next fall. Next fall, of course, arrived, and the uncertainties were still patiently hanging there, alongside some rather rumpled but very real emotions. And questions.

Where does one go when answers are needed? To the Health Information Management office, they tell me, so that's where I start. After days of shifting the trip to the next day on the calendar, putting off a trek into the unknown, I drive down to the hospital, baby in tow. I walk out a surprisingly simple ten minutes later with an envelope of printed sheets dotted with disturbing phrases like, "significant blood loss" and "extravasation of dye."

I hold the surgery notes in my hands, but the results, as they say, are inconclusive. Somewhere between "IVP needed to be performed" and "The patient tolerated the procedure well," something got lost. I look closer and see it is me, crying in a dark and empty x-ray room, my post-operation pain killer waiting too long on the pharmacy counter one floor below. I never knew "alone" until the moment a slapdash x-ray tech asked unfeelingly if I'd had a hysterectomy (I hadn't), while his stone-faced colleague jolted me on the steely table, up, down, and around to get all the right pictures. My baby was in a far off bedroom with my husband, and I was in this dark room, forgotten, with techs who didn't have all the information. I was too sorely alone to give them any answers. The nurse ran in apologetically with the forgotten painkillers. I merely cried. This is not in the doctors' notes.

I wonder again, where does one go when answers are needed? One of our chief communities is church, and lots of friends prayed before this baby came: healthy delivery, safe arrival. One friend even prayed for green lights between our home and the hospital. I have no recollection of the traffic signals between here and there in the snowy dark of that December 4:00 a.m. But I recall a January letter from a friend who'd given birth decades before under similar circumstances, and she voiced a frustration that hadn't surfaced for me yet: "But we asked God for better than this!" Did he not hear our requests? Were our prayers ineffective? These are the deeper questions that run alongside the the uncertainties of what happened on the surgery table.

There are straight - though not easy - answers to the deeper questions, and I know what book to find them in. But most of them ring either hollow or harsh in my ears. I find I've suffered a loss without losing anything, save, perhaps, my faith in medicine to give conclusive answers, my faith in doctors to always care, my trust that things will generally make sense. It's a loss of understanding and thus a loss of control. A corner of my brain reminds me softly that this can be a good thing. I find myself listening to lots of Gillian Welch and mournful old spirituals.

And in these cold, grey days that hearken my thought to the winter past, I start asking. My approach to God is most often akin to my approach to the Health Information office. I put Him off till the next day, and then put Him off again. My faith is utterly small, the tiniest known yet to be recognized as such, I'd wager. But it knows at least what hallway to walk down, and which door the answers lie behind. Now that the asking has begun, I will keep knocking here, even after the doctors have told me all they can (or can't), insistent as a widow that's lost her last coin.

Meantime, in a section of the papers, there is one kind of answer. The doctor had told me over and over that the bits and pieces of me that suffered extra damage had to do with Ella's head getting stuck somehow. "But isn't that often the case in a C-section?" I kept wondering. Now I read and see what tricks the little girl was already pulling. It turns out she wasn't too keen on giving up her restful spot. And so, as the doctor and nurses pulled, she rolled. I can picture it now. I go in to get her in the mornings as she whimpers herself awake, and she rolls away from me, every time. "Not just yet, Mommy," she tells me by the thumb in her mouth, as she pretends sleep for a few moments longer. She's my slow-waking apple, lying awfully close to the tree from which she fell. I get that. "Not just yet," she tried to tell the doctors, as she rolled over in her nine-month sleep spot. And so they tugged her out feet-first, like a heavily sleeping teenaged boy. It took some extra work, and my body took a beating. She was just being Ella, reaching for her pillow, as it were. It's a sweet thought amidst the pain.

In memory, I find that the hardest part to bear of that pain was the aloneness. It still is. Surprisingly, if there is any comfort, it also lies therein. There remains a deep, chilly loneliness in the remembrance of an experience that is only fully known by me - and by One Other. And so I keep open communications, if only to hear there is still no answer except that I am, actually, not alone.

Outside, It's a Rain

The walls are orange and there are white lights that have fallen into a charming mess over the wide street-front windows. Has Mill Mountain always hung lights? I can't remember.

I hear the man behind me monotone into his smartphone as though dictating, "It's a rain, it's a cold, cold rain . . . " Inside, it's warm and toasty. The espresso machine and pastry cases sound a loud, quieting hum. My six-year-old laptop flickers from charge to battery to charge again. I'll have to buy a new one soon. A college student arrives to a boisterous reception from a friend: "You braved the rain!"

The blaring pop tunes overhead change to an Alison Krauss station, and I sink deeper into my table corner against the back wall. Brett Dennen assures that he loves me, "by and by." I picture my husband and baby cozy at home and feel a tug in that direction, but they won't truly miss me for another hour. For now, I will write.

"Rest": A Poem for the Road

Or for anywhere. And for parenthood:

(by Richard Jones, excerpts)

                         "Everything's fine.
The trucks are all together, sleeping
on the gravel shoulders of exit ramps,
and the crowded rest stop I'm driving by
is a perfect oasis in the moonlight.
The way I see it, I've got a second wind
and on the radio an all-night country station.
Nothing for me to do on this road
but drive and give thanks:
I'll be home by dawn."

Read the entire poem here.

"This was before
I had children of my own,
and had felt the sharp edge of love
and anxiety whenever I tiptoed
into darkened rooms of sleep
to study the small, peaceful faces
of my beloved darlings. Now,
the fatherly feelings are so strong
the snoring truckers are lucky
I'm not standing on the running board,
tapping on the window,
asking, Is everything okay?"

Yes. Yes, that is how it is.

*"Rest." by Richard Jones, from The Correct Spelling and Exact Meaning. © Copper Canyon Press, 2010. 

Artful Words

Anne Patchett is quite the styler of words. In The Magician's Assistant, there is this moment:

"We were very close," Sabine said. Her voice was quiet. The bar seemed to press forward; the bartender pushed his upper body across the polished wood, pretending to reach for a bowl of salted nuts.

Sabine is on the edge of divulging, and everyone in the room, including the smooth polished bar itself, leans in to hear. It's a brief half-paragraph of held breath and then it's gone, a pregnant pause if ever there was one. And then Sabine continues talking, her secrets about to spill.

C.S. Lewis talks about mythopoiec moments in literature - cruxes in the narrative where time stands still and some imminent numinous comes crashing in. I don't think I'd tax Patchett's writing with the burden of myth-bearing, but she sure approaches that stand-still moment from time to time. In this particular scene, her words morph into what I first perceived as cinematic. Can't you envision the bartender on screen, leaning in on beefy arms as the lens bends out? But on second read, and third, and fourth, I saw what Patchett had actually done in a mere two sentences.

These are words made art. She throws down language and it comes out as paint before the imagination's eye, a brief moment, loud with sudden silence. The plot stands still, and the bartender - and the bar itself - moves in off the page. As time bending as Dali, as real as Ralph Goings. The reader is caught out of the flow of narrative into something grander, something with a movement of its own. The bartender leans forward across the smooth, shiny, bending counter in all the bold strokes of rich oil on canvas. Patchett doesn't say so, but it's clear to me that he turns his ear in, rag hand forgotten. He wants to hear, as we all do. His motion echoes the reader's desire. It's a brilliant moment before the tide of (also artfully-crafted) plot carries on and we're soon privy to the conversation that we've paused so eagerly to listen in on.

The Magician's Assistant is the third Patchett novel I've read. It's my least favorite so far - though I shouldn't pass judgement till I've finished it - and I still find it lovely. Which means I highly recommend my first two forays: foremost, the stunning Bel Canto. Second, State of Wonder, from which I'm still mildly reeling. If mythopoeic moment isn't Patchett's consistent strength (and I'm by no means suggesting it should be), deft characterization and turn of beautifully-styled phrase is. Is it too much to say Patchett succeeds at what Mary Doria Russell attempts? Please don't hate me. And don't get me wrong: Russell wrote one of my all-time favorites, Children of God - not to be read before reading The Sparrow first, of course.

All to say, get ye to a bookstore (or better - a library!) and check out Bel Canto. And if you like that, try State of Wonder. Heck, throw The Sparrow in your bag, too. And while you're at it, pull Children of God down off the shelf, because you're not going to want to stop at the end of Russell's first sci-fi tale of (truly) space traveling Jesuit priests. There aren't space ships - or Jesuits, for that matter - in Patchett yet. But her language and characters are transporting enough. For the love of all things artful in the ever-morphing literary world, I'm grateful.

At the Intersection of Engineering and Art

Our small family lives here on a short neighborhood road at the intersection of engineering and art. Kenton organizes numbers and plans schedules; I read books and craft words and stitch images. So, say, we're the intersection of math and creativity. The two are not necessarily at odds. And they come to a point in the person of our thirteen-month-old daughter.

In line at the grocery store the other day, I unloaded the cart while Ella did her best to charm the elderly woman behind us. She succeeded. The woman descended from her baby-talking raptures long enough to assure me my daughter is positively artistic. Or else mathematical. "Look at how she fingers the cart handle!" I don't know where that inclination figures into things, but I won't be surprised if the overall assessment is dead on. This girl is sensory enough to notice all fine detail in a two-foot radius. But she's also got door pulls, box clasps, block stacking, and puzzle fittings figured out pretty good. I'd say she's a right combination of her dad and mom.

Engineering and creativity. Math and art.

Our Vermont Christmas trip is still on my mind, and while we were there, I paid two visits to an art gallery in Hanover, New Hampshire. Down on an up-and-coming corner of the growing college town, there is the League of N.H. Craftsmen Gallery. You can enter at the front from Lebanon street, and find yourself in an open, sunny space with gorgeous local art on careful display. Or you can come in at the back, as I always have, climbing steps from the parking deck past the downstairs studio where some bearded man cradles fast-spinning clay in his spackled grey hands. Art in motion.

The back door opens onto display cases filled with jewelry, shelves of blown glass and finished pottery, walls of framed art, and - the jackpot for me, this trip - stacks of matted prints and originals, waiting to be flipped through and fallen in love with. Because that's what it's about, isn't it? We can talk local and we can talk art and quality craftsmanship and we can talk about the grand meeting of the two, but in the end, the value is in the personal connection. The value, really, is in the individual.

On an earlier December trip that involved a flight to Houston, I pulled the copy of GO: Airtran Inflight Magazine from the seat back and read an article on art collecting, "The Artistic Process." The writer, on her own venture to identify quality art and, ultimately, choose a piece of her own, realizes the best choice and the highest value comes down to the painting - or sculpture or carving - that speaks to you personally. We're all different, you know. Our perceptions and pasts and particular "isness" (as Madeline L'Engle would say) converge to make meaning out of surprisingly different items (pictures, songs, books, experiences, memories) from person to person.

The piece that connected with me in this particular gallery was - is - a whimsical serigraph. Entering the back door, I flipped through a stack topped by a stylized depiction of a creek bed, right up Kenton's alley, I thought, though somehow not to my taste. I wondered if there would be a piece to satisfy us both. There was: a small, 3 x 7 inch view through a birch forest to a hilltop cluster of pines, with a winding moonbeam - or is it a whitened snow path? - lighting the way. I loved the spareness of the rendering. It felt faintly magical. And I was immediately reminded of a scene from L.M. Montgomery's lesser-known Emily of New Moon, wherein the title character, Montgomery-ish heroine as she is (I can stomach only so much of her heroines naming every nature item in sight), names her front yard trees and makes friends of them. Appropriately, the painting was titled "Meeting Old Friends." I carried it around the gallery with me. I brought Kenton back for a second opinion. I deemed it well worth the price. I walked out the door, art in-hand. 

Like the Airtran article said, it's about the personal connection with the crafted item. But doesn't that leave things a little fuzzy and grey? How, then, can value be determined? And not just regarding art, but in the matter of people, too. If everyone is so different - artist here, engineer there - how can we be figured out, known, understood? How can we know ourselves when isness is so variable?

Before our flurry of holiday travels, Kenton and I went on a birthday date to see Hugo at the movies. He was excited about the 3D; I anticipated the glimpses of beauty hinted at in the online trailer. (Those impossible, gorgeous stacks of books!) Our expectations did not go unmet. From the winding of the gears to the unfolding of the plot, from the artful acting to the 3D visual direction, we were both entirely satisfied. And we were most struck by the larger theme: everyone is unique, and everyone has a purpose. In fact, the best team in the movie is the boy who repairs clocks and the girl he befriends who writes stories. It felt familiar.

There is a telling scene toward the climax, a key moment in the life of young protagonist Hugo Cabret, orphan, secret train-station resident, silent clock-winder. He looks down from his perch in one of the impossibly high and lovely clocks it is his self-appointed business to keep running. He sees Monsieur Labisse, the station's bookstore owner, hand a book to a customer. Watching, Hugo realizes something about the bookseller, and about the workings of society, and about himself. He ruminates (I paraphrase here), "We are all made to do something, aren't we? Monsieur Labisse's job is to connect people with the right books." To his young friend Isabelle, he declares with confidence, "Your job is to write. What is my purpose?" He knows he must have one. He suspects something about that. "Maybe my purpose is to fix things."

The two friends are a team, and their individual purposes, their individual selves, work together for the good of many - and for the endurance of art, at that. She writes; he fixes. She descends from artists, he from engineers of the clock making sort. Engineering and art. Quite the pair.

Admittedly, real life and real people are more complex. Kenton's got an eye for design and I can add numbers in my head at a frighteningly quick rate for someone who can't do much else with them. And, of course, we go much deeper and broader still.

Still. Engineering and art. If it were possible to Googlemap the two, you'd be directed to a small, grey 1940's Cape Cod, five driveways up from a quiet dead-end. Inside, there would be us: me with a book, or laptop, or vague gaze out the window; Kenton with book, or budget, or project that involves measuring and cutting; Ella serving make-believe food to her stuffed bear, and then turning on a dime to stack blocks with impressive thirteen-month-old precision.

Madeline L'Engle talks about individual identity, implying there's a certain glory in being precisely who we are, each person as unique as the piece of art I brought home with me. She calls it "isness." And when that individuality is paired? She says of her relationship with her husband: "we are willing to let each other be; as we are; two diametrically opposite human beings in many ways, which has often led to storminess. But I think we are both learning not to chafe at the other's particular isness."*

Perhaps I am a fool, but I am hopeful. I look forward and suspect our little family will be quite the team. In the end, at the New Hampshire gallery, Kenton approved my art choice; I know him, and he knows me. In the end, Hugo Cabret and his friend Isabelle were each stronger and safer for their friendship. In the end, the mysteries of individuality and of relationship - the intersection of our isnesses - remain a surpassing beauty. It's been said "a threefold cord is not quickly broken." That's generally interpreted to include God as one strand amongst the three. But I also think that, here at the intersection of many things, we three individuals do and will augment each other. . . . Yes, quite the team.

* L'Engle, Madeline. A Circle of Quiet. HarperCollins: New York, 1972. p. 110

** Ecclesiastes 4:12, English Standard Version