“Books to me are portals to the unknown — a place where the mind can rest and rage simultaneously. Books make the future imaginable and the past tolerable. They widen the scope of human existence by telling individual stories of grace, strength, wit, and sadness. They make me want to live deeper and better.” ~ Eve Stone
Let’s see… October already. The other day, a company called to schedule delivery of a light fixture and the first date available was September 26. I freaked out… for some reason, that date sounded like it was 2 months away. Lol. I don’t really know how the time is passing so quickly!
Our house is coming up quickly all of a sudden. Here’s the latest on that:
We’re finalizing our kitchen cabinet order and sketching out all our other cabinets. In the next couple of days, we’ll have steps up to a second floor!
Sweet Girl is loving fourth grade and doing homework as soon as she gets home each day without complaint. That’s a huge improvement! We started our Girl Scout year, observed the Jewish holidays, and went to a Kidz Bop concert and an Astros game. (We’re on to the playoffs next week!) I met with my book fair planning committee to get that ball rolling.
My nephew had his bar mitzvah this past weekend and it was an excellent time from beginning to end. I loved seeing family and special friends we don’t get to see very often. My sister and brother-in-law did a stellar job on every little detail. I cannot believe how grown up her little baby is all of a sudden! It feels like last year that I made his baby scrapbook. And, of course, I was taking notes for SG’s bat mitzvah in 3 years. Eek.
Enjoy the book reviews. Of them all, I’d highly recommend Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover. Also, right now I’m reading Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, from which I’m learning quite a bit. Please share your recommendations!
The Masterpiece: a Novel by Fiona Davis
I’d been waiting for this one to be released since I loved her 2 previous novels and got this right away from the library. It’s about a down-on-her-luck divorced woman who moves to New York and has to take a job helping in the information booth at Grand Central Station. Now that I think of it, all 3 of her main characters move to NYC from another small-town location at the beginning of her novels. Anyway, this one, Virginia, stumbles upon an art school that was upstairs when the place was brand new. As Fiona Davis loves to do, she alternates between this story and 40 years prior, when Clara was an instructor in that very art school. Clara is struggling to make a living as well. We learn of her determination to make something of herself and her fight against the current of the times. Of course paths collide in an unlikely way and the story unfolds.
I loved it. It felt like I knew each and every character well and I enjoyed the peek into the art scene in the 1940s. It’s a quick but fun and interesting read.
“The first time she’d entered the hallowed space, stepping off the train from Arizona last September, she’d stopped and stared, her mouth open, until a man brushed past her, swearing under his breath at her inertia. The vastness of the main concourse, where sunshine beamed through the giant windows and bronze chandeliers glowed, left her gobsmacked. With its exhilarating mix of light, air, and movement, the terminal was the perfect location for a school of art.”
“… even if she didn’t speak like they did, her confidence and passion in her own work were unwavering. When she drew or painted, it was as if an unseen hand guided her own. She’d never been able to explain that to anyone. To her, painting was an internal expression, not a political or social one. She didn’t have a manifesto or an affiliation, other than to please herself doing what she loved to do and make money doing it. The first part was easy — the second, more elusive.”
“Look at me. No one knows what I am. But I don’t care, because I love the way I move in the world. I love my perspective on the world. I’ve earned it, and anyone else can go to hell. I wouldn’t have wanted to paint you if I didn’t think you were a fascinating subject: a woman of a certain age, with the wounds to prove it. That’s what interests me. Desperate to cover those wounds but still carrying them capably. A woman who is just learning her own strength.”
The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish
“Today, when he’d peered under that staircase, it was as though what he’d starved for all these lifeless moths of dissertation research had been restored to him. History, reaching out and caressing his face once more, the way it had years ago as he sat reading at his parents’ kitchen table. The gentle, insistent touch of something like a conscience, stilling him. Waking him to a lucid new purpose.”
My absolute favorite book is A.S. Byatt’s Possession, a story of two researchers who discover old letters and documents…. I picked up The Weight of Ink not knowing it is amazingly similar! It tells of two women 400 years apart – one daring to study and pen letters to famous philosophers in secret as she scribes for a blind rabbi, the other an historian. 1660s London and Amsterdam was a time and place when Jews had to hide their identity in some places and women were not permitted to study.
This novel recently won the National Jewish Book Award and is our Community Read for the Jewish Book and Art Festival here in November. Every character is developed completely and all the historical details are accurate. History. Theology. Religion. Philosophy. Sexuality. The role of women. There are many levels to the stories in the novel and really no way to give you an accurate account here. Just know that it’s very much worth a read! It’s an exceptional book.
“She knew she’d no right to call this feeling love, when she betrayed the rabbi daily. Yet even in her own writing, when she posed questions he’d regard as blasphemy, she carried the rabbi ever in her mind, and his goodness remained the standard against which she tested her understanding of the world. It was the highest love she was capable of: respect… The greatest act of love — indeed, the only religion she could comprehend — was to speak the truth about the world. Love must be, then, an act of truth-telling, a baring of mind and spirit just as ardent as the baring of the body. Truth and passion were one, and each impossible without the other.”
Love and Ruin: A Novel by Paula McLain
This is a fictionalized story of the relationship between Ernst Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, his third wife. Both were successful writers and wartime correspondents. Told from Gellhorn’s perspective, the story highlights how the relationship changed over time because Hemingway struggled with Gellhorn’s need for independence.
I enjoyed watching how each approached their writing, learning about the friends and family they surrounded themselves with, what it might be like to be a war-time journalist.
It made me feel shaky and horribly lonely—and brought Spain back more sharply. Anything and anyone could disappear on you, and you could disappear, too, if you didn’t have people around who really knew you. Who were there solidly, meeting you exactly where you stood when life grew stormy and terrifying. Who could find you when you were lost and couldn’t find yourself, not even in the mirror.
“The places I’d just been and the people who’d moved me were with me, ready to feed my work. And I saw now, in a way I hadn’t before, how having Ernest made it possible for me to go away and return, changed and stronger, and better, and more myself somehow… I didn’t want to have this life with Ernest and my work to prove I could have everything. I needed them both in order to feel whole.”
Everything That Remains: A Memoir by The Minimalists, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus
Imagine a friendly, intent young guy sitting down with you at a coffee shop for a couple hours to tell you how he made all sorts of improvements in his life, and you have this fine book. Each topic has it’s own stories and anecdotes, which unfold in the book. It’s about how our possessions box us in, how we can free ourselves from being perpetually unsatisfied, that goals and achievement aren’t the path to finding your passion, and that careers shouldn’t define our core identity. I like how he equates getting organized as being nothing more than “well-planned hoarding.”
“We all know instinctually how to declutter—how to get “organized.” But that’s just one part of the larger issue. Instead of “get organized,” I’ve decided I need to start thinking of organizing as a dirty word, a sneaky little profanity who keeps us from really simplifying our lives.”
“…we tend to hang on to things—jobs, relationships, material possessions—in an effort to feel secure. But many of the things we cling to in search of security actually drain the satisfaction from our lives, leaving us discontented and overwhelmed.”
Ultimately, by sharing his own experiences on this path, Joshua wants us see how good it feels to make room in our lives for what we find most fulfilling. “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.” It’s a quick read and very engaging.
The Air You Breathe: A Novel by Frances de Pontes Peebles
A coming-of-age story about two girls growing up in 1930s Brazil and then 1940s Hollywood who are nothing alike and yet become something like friends. I didn’t love this one. I didn’t really like the characters, nor the way Peebles kept going back and forth from the present to the past. The book made for slow reading.
Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover
The journey from a very small life in Idaho (not even going to school – her parents were anti-establishment Mormons) to earning a PhD from Cambridge through sheer internal will. Along the way, there is the mental instability of most of her immediate family members, extreme abuse to overcome, and quite a lot to learn about society and functioning in the world. That Tara was able to change her future is amazing and just remarkable. This story is gripping, inspiring, and captivating. Highly recommend.
“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”
And at the end, one of her mentors told her, “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.”
Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward
There are definitely going to be some readers who’ll be shocked by this book. I’m not one of them. Obviously there’s chaos in the White House, the country being “tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader.” What I didn’t realize was just how much Trump was going to try to show up for work! Despite his stunned disbelief that he woke up the day after the election to be POTUS, he actually seems to want to make some changes instead of just playing golf and watching Fox News 24/7.
What I found more than amusing was reading about those who surround the President. They evade him repeatedly in the hope that he’ll forget his ideas (and he does have a mercurial mind), cause executive orders to “disappear” from his desk before they’re signed, and try to provide reasons that convince him that his ideas may not be such great ideas, or at least, that there are long, thought-out reasons why things are set up the way they are, and that there would be severe global consequences for changing things as he thinks best. They seem to arrange for “Being President 101” seminars for him often.
Just about nothing is following the policy process at the White House as it’s meant to. Departments that are meant to confer with others are not doing so. Some individuals are thwarting entire committees to make decisions on their own. It’s absolute chaos. There is no logic to how the President makes his decisions, besides perhaps emotionally reacting to what he sees in the media. I think I read the entire book with my eyebrows raised in amusement.
“The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments.”
“As if there were no American interests in forging and keeping a peaceful world order, as if the American organizing principle was money.”
The chapters span from before his nomination to today, covering topics such as immigration, racial divisions, tax reforms, North Korea, South Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, NATO, and trade. he sad result is that our greatest fears about Trump, his bullish, disrespectful and offensive character, and his inability to constructively contribute to a domestic and international political and economic agenda have a solid foundation, and are not just a front.
A good third of the book is a listing of Woodward’s sources: interviews, meeting notes, personal diaries, files and documents. Given who Woodward is, I have to believe most of his account of life in the White House. Despite it’s complete nuttiness, it’s actually better than I had thought! We already knew he doesn’t “work well with others.” A liar. Disrespectful. Ignorant. We knew he isn’t very analytical (or even moral) in his decision-making. Now we need to get him to understand that he’s not just running another business here… there’s more at stake that he really cares about.
And I just have to say again that despite having read more than a handful of books about the recent polarization of our country, many from viewpoints opposite my own, I still don’t understand why anyone would have voted for him. I just don’t get it at all. THAT is what shocks me.
Naomi, Congratulations on your building progress, so much work!
I always enjoy your book lists and reviews. Thank you. I like to request them from my library. One recommendation I have to share with you this month: American Marriage by Tayari Jones
I have been thinking of reading that one for a while now! It got mixed reviews… but most people say that even if they didn’t relate to it, it made them think, so that’s all the convincing I need. Requesting it now. I love the library too because otherwise I’d probably be bankrupt! xoxo