Olive Kitteridge

Most people know I grew up in Kansas, and although Wichita is not a particularly small town, it sometimes felt that way. Family trips up to Ipswich, MA to see my cousins, or summer vacations to Santa Fe, Colorado or Italy confirmed to me that the world was bigger and I needed to see it.  I couldn't imagine why everyone didn't want to leave.  I moved to Boston after graduation and hardly looked back.   I thought reading Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout reminded me of the insularity I sometimes felt growing up.

Olive is the main character connecting a dozen or so stories set in small town Maine.  She's a curmudgeon, large and unattractive, overbearing and overall mean.  In short, not a sympathetic character.  The people in her town are gossips and un-motivated.  Her son manages to escape first to California, and then to New York.  The other men in the book seem broken and the women seem to get by mostly by being crazy and/or drunk.

It's been more (ahem) than 10 years I've lived in Boston and I can recall Wichita fondly.  I'm happy to still have close friends I grew up with; some moved away, and some stayed there.  But they're happy and successful.  I'm better able to connect with fellow midwestern ex-pats and appreciate that friendliness.  And I've come to realize that New Englanders are just as insular, if not more, than midwesterners.  The discomfort I felt reading Olive Kitteridge came from my own feeling of being sucked in to Boston.

Ms. Strout is a wonderful writer. Her scenes and characters are evocative to a fault.  So it's not the writing, but the subject matter.  Last spring I met a woman in my neighborhood and upon telling her that we like to recruit a geographically diverse housestaff to my hospital, her response, "But why would that matter?" seemed to summarize my overall frustration with Olive Kitteridge.

Netflix stars: 3/5.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Recommended to me, and with a very long wait at the library, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery seemed like a sure fire hit for me.  It's also French!  But it just never really took off.  The main protagonists, a French concierge in a fancy apartment complex and the 12 year old daughter of a pair of inhabitants, are both philosophical and literary snobs. The concierge, Madame Michel, pretends to hold up the stereotype of the concierge-- lazy, uneducated and with little interest beyond her tv.  Paloma is a smart girl, but hides from her family, who she thinks are ridiculous.  It was hard for me to figure out why both these characters were playing so miserable and it wasn't until late in the book the reader is clued in.

Part of my issues with this might have been the poor translation.  The basic sentence structure was at times awkward, and there names and places that just didn't translate at all to the American audience.  I'm a patient reader and it takes a lot for me to not give a book a full chance, but if I had to do it again, I probably wouldn't finish it.  But I did and it partly redeemed itself, so I'm giving it 2 stars.  Read at your own risk.

A Short History of Women

Everyone loves hearing stories about their grandparents.  They lived difficult lives (World Wars, the Depression), astonishing lives (world travel when Europe was quaint and affordable), had love lives (meeting by post, starting farms in desolate lands).  Our grandmas came of age when women didn't have a lot of rights.  My own grandma was born just one year after women gained the right to vote.  During WWII she worked as a riveter and later joined my grandfather running a furniture store.  A few decades earlier women were making huge strides.  My sister read a book about Trudy Ederle, the first women to swim the English Channel.  Coco Before Chanel is the story of Coco Chanel and how she became stylish and famous by pure grit and determination.
But not all women created worldwide impacts.  Kate Walbert's novel A Short History of Women tells of four generations of women who try to make a difference, but just as easily are forgotten.  Dorothy Townsend is a 19th century suffragette who dies during a hunger strike.  Her children are sent away and their children barely know the sacrifice she made.  Her daughter Evelyn is an accomplished chemist, but is taught during a time when women are told to keep their work private, lest men find out and get jealous.  Her niece Dorothy resists authority late in life by taking photos at an off-limits military base-- only to have her own daughter apologize in shame. 
Ms. Townsend's novel reminded me of the loneliness of The Hours.  These were stories about women trying to Do Something, even if it came at a cost. We know our grandmas, and we know Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart, Indira Gandhi, Virginia Woolf and Hillary.  But this book reminded me of all the unrecognized women who made/make sacrifices.  When there is an election and I vote, I know it's because of them that I can.
5/5 netflix stars

A Walk In The Woods

My mom liked to say that from Kansas, you could get to somewhere fun in a mere 12 hour drive.  The beaches on the Gulf were 12 hours to the south, the mountains 12 hours to the west, and deserts and cacti 12 hours to the southwest.  We spent many summers in Colorado or Santa Fe, and most vacations involved some rustic cabin living and lots of hiking.  We had our favorite trails-- the Alpine Trail near where we stayed in Buena Vista, CO and the ski basin in Santa Fe.  But these trails would represent just a centimeter of the 2,200 miles of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia up to Maine.  In the mid-90s Bill Bryson and his friend Steven Katz decided to hike the AT over the course of several months, and A Walk In The Woods is Bryson's record of that adventure.
I started this book as part of the Emergency Holiday Challenge and remembered Steph loving it and was even told by someone in my yoga class how funny it was.  And while it was funny, it was also wistful and kind of sad.  Bryson would intersperse details of the hike (lots of walking, lots of trees) with facts about the AT and the environmental changes.  We've all heard about the demise of the passenger pigeon, and the relatively quick fell of the American Chestnut trees...Bryson lectures us just to the point of depression and then says, "back to the trail!"
Even though this book is just about 10 years old, at times it felt dated.  Bryson writes with disdain about people to bring modems hiking so they can share stories from the trail (um, that would be blogging) and writes with amazement that some people have brought satellite tracking devices (what we now know as GPS!).  Every few days they arrive at a small town where they check in with their families from payphones.  Cell phones were not rampant yet.
2,200 miles is a lot of hiking and without giving anything away, a six-mile day hike on a trail of woods, streams and mountains maybe gives you the same idea as 6 months of the same.  Day hikes let you get back to the relative warmth of a cabin (and maybe access to some soothing hot springs) by 6 pm.  Nevertheless, I feel lucky that we have the luxury of wilderness to hike in, that despite the extinction of species, we generally value unspoiled nature.
4/5 netflix stars

The Help and Strength in What Remains

The Revolutions of 1989 were by and large bloodless; the Velvet Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolutions of other Eastern Bloc countries resulted in the end of Communism and peaceful transfer of power. Twenty years before that Dr. Martin Luther King epitomized the non-violent struggle for civil rights.  The Help by Kathryn Stockett describes the stories of three women: one privileged white woman who along with two African American maids work together to tell the stories of behind the scenes lives, and in the process create a non-violent revolution in Jackson, Mississippi.  Each woman makes personal sacrifices for the greater good-- even though at the time they have no idea what that good will be.  Ms. Stockett tells the story of The Help in three viewpoints-- Skeeter's, Aibileen's and Minny's.  Each woman has a personal impetus to enact change, but what's amazing is how the three of them come to work together.
The revolutions of 1989 were not all peaceful. Tianamen Square took place that summer.  Likewise, 1994 brought about revolutions too. The very violent kind.  Extreme poverty for the majority and extreme wealth for the minority set the catalyst for the ethic genocides in Burundi and Rwanda.  Tracy Kidder relays Deo's story in Strength in What Remains.  Similar to What is the What, Deo miraculously flees Burundi and lands in New York with $200, no place to live and barely understanding a word of English.  Within five years he's enrolled at Columbia and soon after that, Dartmouth Medical School.  Mr. Kidder relays Deo's story in a series of viewpoints also.  He writes as a journalist, telling Deo's history as Deo remembers it.  Then he tells the history of the country, so the reader can better understand how events took a turn from the worse, and finally, he tells his story: how he met Deo and his impressions of him and his relationship to him and their return together to Burundi.  Mr. Kidder's document seemed a more complete story than What is the What.
In The Help, Skeeter is amazed that Aibileen is such a voracious reader, and that other maids who work for her friends have gone to college and aspire to send their children to college.  Many of white women Skeeter is friends with cannot see past the color and occupation of their maids.  But what surprised me was that Deo's story in New York was similar.  He'd come from being an intern at a hospital in Burundi to being a grocery delivery boy who made $15 a week in New York.  Just as the family Aibileen works for dehumanizes her by not even allowing her to use a bathroom in the house, Deo's employer literally pokes him with a stick to make him work.
Both books are good reminders that revolutions are, and should be, dynamic and constant.  I give both 5/5 netflix stars.

A Gate at the Stairs

The past seven or eight years have brought a host of post-9/11 novels. Some are good, some are bad. I like that most maintain the delicate balance of public tragedy and a new world order with people who still need to live their lives. A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore seems to almost privatize the public and publicize the private.  So I've been processing it the past couple days and am still not sure what I think.
Tassie is the protagonist; a good, Midwestern girl entering her sophomore year of college as 9/11 takes place.  She takes it in stride, instead worrying about what any 20 year old would worry about-- finding a job and finding a boyfriend.  She takes a job as a nanny for a bourgeois yet very liberal older couple who are adopting.  Sarah and Edward bring Tassie along to meet various birth mothers and finally end up with a mixed race 2-year old.  From here the story takes off: Sarah becomes a mouthpiece for every liberal stereotype-- she worries about Emmie facing racism and so forms a support group of like minded (sometimes) parents.  But as Tassie brings Emmie everywhere, she bears the brunt of public reaction-- is she the young mom?  The baby daddy must be black (bringing positive and negative reaction).  She absorbs it and meanders between her Sufism class and her boyfriend's (of dubious heritage and ethnicity himself) house, all the while forgetting that her younger brother is threatening to join the army after graduating high school.
A Gate at the Stairs is dialogue rich and Tassie's carte blanche viewpoint makes us realize our culpability with so many pre and post-9/11 social issues.  It's a compelling read and a great way to get back into novels after reading so much non-fiction.  It raises questions without providing answers. 
This is a vague review...readers and comments welcome!
Netflix stars: 4/5

The Thoreau You Don't Know: What The Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant

Having friends whose babies are learning to talk, I asked my mom what my first word was.  Her response? "Thoreau".  You might think from this that my parents were hippies, that they were social dissidents or that I was born to recluses in a cabin in the woods.  Or you might think I listened to "Walden" nightly while in my mom's womb.  Whatever you might think, it's probably wrong.  And that's why Robert Sullivan wrote The Thoreau You Don't Know: What The Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant.  He wants to expand on the Thoreau we all know from reading excerpts of Walden in high school.  He wants to prove that Thoreau wasn't just an old curmudgeon.

The Thoreau You Don't Know is a very accessible biography of a now lauded American citizen.  Sullivan tells us that Thoreau was critical of society while also striving to make it better.  He came from a family of hard workers and was a successful business man (pencils!)-- not a lazy good-for-nothing bumming around in the woods.  He aimed to be a writer and a poet while knowing that it might not pay the bills-- and so supplemented his writing by doing chores for Emerson, teaching and even bringing in income from his bean crops at Walden.

Sullivan's love for Thoreau became my love for Thoreau.  I can't help but smile knowing that all his actions and his life's work were deliberate-- even if unpopular at the time (after his death a friend said he loved Thoreau, but didn't like him).  He only lived to be 45, but did so much-- and often did it with a sense of humor.  Sullivan reports that he spoke with humor and irony.

We know the Thoreau who coined the term "succession" and the Thoreau who inspired Dr. Martin Luther King.  But The Thoreau We Don't Know was also a product of his time-- a time of progression and societal change.  Sullivan shows us that Thoreau.

I give this book 4/5 netflix stars. 

And if you're curious why my first word was Thoreau?  Thoreau was the name of our family dog!